Distributed On-Demand Serving Mechanisms for Location-Based Information Sharing

Frequent location updates from mobile clients make the server a bottleneck for severe communication and processing overhead in large scale location-based information sharing system. From our observation, implanted information is not distributed uniformly in geography, which leads to some blank zones. In existing systems, the client needs to update its location on the server periodically no matter whether any information needs to be shared, which brings extra communication overhead. We present an information indexing scheme, providing on-demand information request for mobile clients. In this scheme, an information matrix is built on the server and synchronized to clients, in which each element indicates whether the information is implanted in the associated zone. Clients decide when to request for downloading related information as distributed mode instead of server central mode. Experimental results show that the scheme can greatly eliminate communication overhead and work well especially for applications with unevenly distributed information.