Location management in distributed mobile environments

Location management is an important problem in distributed mobile computing. Location management consists of location updates, searches and search-updates. An update occurs when a mobile host changes location. A search occurs when a mobile host needs to be located. A search-update occurs after a successful search. Various strategies can be designed for search, update and search-update. Static location management uses one combination of search, update and search-update strategies throughout the execution. Simulations were carried out to evaluate the performance of different static strategies for various communication and mobility patterns. Simulation results indicate that performing search-updates significantly reduces the message overhead of location management