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.