Mobility-supporting data management for location-based mobile systems: the special case of single category location repositories

Abstract

Location-based mobile applications require timely generation of user-centric proximities from application-relevant repositories of business locations. The proximity generation requirement is poorly served by conventional query resolution methods which are prone to response time degradation as repositories experience growth. This article reports research on a location-aware method (LAM) specifically devised to resolve queries for rapid proximity generation. Three operational concerns performance, scalability, and manageability provide a basis on which a specific form of LAM, linkcell-based LAM, is examined. Previous evaluative work on linkcell-based LAM focused on multiple category repositories (MCRs) in which business locations are explicitly classified using a predefined set of business categories. The research reported here concerns single category repositories (SCRs), an important special case in which no predefined set of business categories is used. Results show how a reformulated location-aware method may be used to manage SCRs and suggest the means by which scalability is achieved and proximity generation performance is optimised.