Architecture of a large-scale location service

Location-aware services are a promising way of exploiting the special possibilities created by ubiquitous mobile devices and wireless communication. Advanced location-aware applications will require highly accurate information about the geographic location of mobile objects and functionality that goes beyond simply querying the user's position, for example determining all mobile objects inside a certain geographic area. In this paper, we propose a generic large-scale location service, which has been designed with the goal of managing the highly dynamic location information for a large number of mobile objects, thus providing a common infrastructure that can be employed by location-aware applications. We propose a hierarchical distributed architecture, which can efficiently process these queries in a scalable way. To be able to deal with the frequent updates and queries resulting from highly dynamic location information, we propose a data storage component, which makes use of a main memory database.