Development of an embedded Spatial MMDBMS for spatial mobile devices

Abstract

Recently, with the development of wireless communications and mobile computing, interest about mobile computing is rising. Mobile computing can be regarded as an environment where a user carries mobile devices, such as a PDA or a notebook, and shares resources with a server computer via wireless communications. A mobile database refers to a database which is used in these mobile devices. The mobile database can be used in the fields of insurance business, banking business, medical treatment, and so on. Especially, LBS(Location Based Service) which utilizes location information of users becomes an essential field of mobile computing. In order to support LBS in the mobile environment, there must be an Embedded Spatial MMDBMS(Main-Memory Database Management System) that can efficiently manage large spatial data in spatial mobile devices. Therefore, in this paper, we designed and implemented an Embedded Spatial MMDBMS, extended from the HSQLDB which is an existing MMDBMS for PC, to manage spatial data efficiently in spatial mobile devices. The Embedded Spatial MMDBMS adopted the spatial data model proposed by ISO(International Organization for Standardization), provided the arithmetic coding method that is suitable for spatial data, and supported the efficient spatial index which uses the MBR compression and hashing method suitable for spatial mobile devices. In addition, the system offered the spatial data display capability in lowperformance processors of spatial mobile devices and supported the data caching and synchronization capability for performance improvement of spatial data import/export between the Embedded Spatial MMDBMS and the GIS server.