MobiMsg: A Resource-Efficient Location-Based Mobile Instant Messaging System

Location-based applications and services, especially those facilitating social networking, are becoming increasingly popular in our everyday lives. In this paper, we develop a location-based mobile instant messaging system named MobiMsg, which features favorable resource efficiency. We propose a universal architecture that supports broadcasting of messages to users in a particular physical region. With this architecture, MobiMsg can be used in IP-based wireless networks rather than cellular networks. This system pays special attention to resource efficiency of both mobile devices and the server, including MSS (message sending server) and LSS (location search server). Message push mechanism is used to save energy in mobile devices, and the LM2C (LSS and MSS to client) architecture is exploited to reduce resource usage in the server. We implement a prototype of MobiMsg, which integrates instant messaging and location-bases services. Tests are performed on the prototype to verify the design of MobiMsg.