On the design of a location and query management strategy for mobile and wireless environments

Abstract

The rapid development of wireless digital communication technology led to a new computing environment known as mobile or nomadic computing. Mobile computing no longer requires users to confine to wired network premises, but rather it enables users to access information regardless of their location. Mobility of mobile users poses a new class of problems in the fields of networking, operating systems, and databases. Location management and location dependent query processing are major challenges in mobile computing. Location management addresses the issue of continuously keeping track of the location of each user. This article presents the architecture for the location and query management based on distributed databases and distributed object management standards. The architecture is implemented using the common object request broker architecture (CORBA) and mobile IP standards.