A quorum-based dynamic location management method for mobile computings

Managing location information of mobile hosts is an important issue in mobile computing systems. There is a trade-off between location update and search, when a mobile host moves. This paper proposes a simple quorum-based distributed dynamic location management method using location registers. The cost of location updates and searches is reduced by our method because the location information of mobile hosts is managed efficiently in a subset of location registers instead of in all location registers. In our method, the subset of location registers is dynamically changed, and the load of each location register is balanced by considering query rate for mobile hosts. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in terms of the total cost of a location update and a location search, and is compared with Prakash's algorithm.