A Location-Based Peer-to-Peer Network for Context-Aware Services in a Ubiquitous Environment

With the popularization of today’s mobile devices, the environment that enables us to publish and utilize information independent of location and time has been actualized. In the future, various kinds of sensors such as GPS as well as network-enabled appliances will also be connected to the Internet. By utilizing various kinds of information acquired from these network terminals, advanced context-aware services will be produced. For realizing context-aware services, we focus on information management and retrieval using a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. In this paper, we propose a location-based P2P network named the LL-Net. By constructing a P2P overlay network based on locations of peers, the LL-Net achieves efficient propagation of location-dependent queries issued by context-aware services.