An architecture for location dependent query processing

As the mobility of people increases, anytime, anywhere computing has become a must. With the advances in wireless communications, the geographical position of the mobile user can be estimated accurately enough to be used to access data dependent on it. Location awareness then enables new kinds of services specific to localized information. While this provides great flexibility for the end user, it creates many challenges for the content providers and wireless operators. We propose an architecture, location dependent services manager (LDSM), between the mobile user and the service/content providers to service location dependent applications which access location dependent data. The proposed middleware does location translation which we call location leveling, to adjust the location granularities and to solve the location mismatch problem. Quality of query results and the complicated queries involving more than one service provider is also supported in this middleware. We give an overview of the proposed architecture, examine the query processing issues and discuss the future work plans.