The Impact of Zoning Concept on Data-Flow Management within LBS System Components

Typical Location Based Services (LBS) system is compound of a mobile device with positioning capability connected to a LBS service provider via wireless network. Thus, the efficiency of LBS System depends on each sub-element composing its architecture. One of the most important factors affecting LBS efficiency is the volume of data streamed from the server to the client. This problem has emerged as a consequence of customer demands for richer services such as videos and high-quality pictures. Therefore this paper discusses the impacts of transmitting huge size of information and services on: the mobile devices, wireless networks and the data server. In addition, it introduces a mechanism to improve the data flow based on the zoning concept in which data is organised in individual databases and then streamed gradually according to the end user’s new location. The outcome of the evaluation of this mechanism has shown better utilisation of the mobile device resources (memory and battery) as well as reducing the network and server consumption time.