Location Dependent Querying in Mobile Computing

Abstract
Mobile computing is one type of technology, ability to use computing capability without a pre-defined location and/or connection to a network to publish and/or subscribe to information. The client in a mobile environment can change locations; dependent on that position (location) of the client possibility of answering queries will be permitted and also based upon location constraints enables the possibility of answering queries. Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS), Global Positioning System (GPS) are used to find the location of the client and gives the answer depending on the client location. This paper gives short review on location dependent querying in mobile computing.

1. Introduction
Efficient location and coordination of staff in any large organization is a difficult and recurring problem, Hospitals, for example, may require upto date information about the location of staff and patients, particularly when medical emergencies arise. In an office building, a receptionist is usually responsible for determining the location of staff members; in some organizations, public-address systems are provided to help a receptionist locate employees but, more frequently, a telephone is used to contact all the possible locations at which the required person might be found. These solutions can cause a great deal of irritation and disruption to other employees; a solution that provides direct location information is more desirable. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews the related work on location dependent querying while Section 3 reviews the Advanced Traveler Information Systems Section 4 reviews the mobile wireless computing environment Section 5 reviews the ubiquitous computing environment Section 6 reviews the active badges and Section 7 gives some of the conclusions.

2. Related Work
The fact that clients in a mobile environment can change locations enables the possibility of answering queries in a way that is dependent on the current position of the client. Imielinski and Badrinath [2] presented the concept of queries with location constraints, i.e., constraints which involve location of the mobile computing users. For instance the query Find me a doctor near the campus has a unary constraint on location. The query find A, B, and C such they are in the same building and B is between A and B involves a ternary constraint (between) plus three unary constraints involving individual locations (in the same building). The main problem becomes how to minimize the communication cost to retrieve the necessary information to answer the query. Naive strategies result in too many messages and long latencies. On the other hand, building optimal plans can be shown to be NP-complete. The authors suggest using greedy heuristics based on the ID3 algorithm to solve the problem. Imielinski and Navas[3] discuss a family of protocols that integrate Global Positioning System (GPS)1 into IP to enable the creation of location dependent services. Global Positioning System (GPS) will be deployed in day to day and possibly in every user terminal. A users location will become information that is as common as the date is today, getting input from GPS, when outdoors, and other location providing devices, when indoors. Availability of location information will have a broad impact on application level as well as on network level software. For Example of these services are: multicasting messages selectively to specific geographical locations (such as a train station), providing services to clients within a certain geographical range from the server and providing information for mobile users when that information depends on the users location.

2.1 Querying in highly mobile distributed environments

Mobile users will be able to ask ad hoc queries addressed to large databases describing the local area: information about people, places, its geography, services available, etc. Typical queries from mobile users will range from simple requests such as Where is X? or Where is the nearest doctor? to more complex Find me the best route to the hospital with the best traffic conditions. Queries may also request data from a mobile source in a location transparent mode the recent sales figures from a traveling sales man who stores this data in the memory of his mobile palm-top terminal.

2.1.1Queries and Updates

The set of users together with their characteristics (including location) can be viewed as a database distributed between different locations servers. We will assume a simple object oriented view: our database will have a form of the class of users characterized by a number of methods and instance variables (attributes). One of these methods will determine the location of the user. This class will be stored as a relation which is horizontally partitioned between different location servers according to the home areas of users. Further in the paper we will talk extensively about querying and updating such a database by updates we will really mean location updates of the current location of the user. These massive updates will not be transactional in nature and will not require locking. Queries will be standard relational queries which could involve the location attribute both in selection as well as in the target clause.

2.1.2Do not tell me - if I do not want to know: Updates

The main idea in this section is that users do not have to inform the location server about each and every change of their location. In other words we should leave a certain degree of ignorance about the state of the system (i.e. users locations in this case). We postulate that ignorance should be bounded, i.e., we should not be too far off from the truth. In fact, the bounded ignorance approach will guarantee that the real position of the object and the position which is known are always in the same partition. Partitions are defined depending on the user mobility patterns and will help to maintain a certain degree of knowledge about users whereabouts (i.e., I do not know where you are exactly at this time but I know that you are in New Brunswick). Maintaining such knowledge comes with a cost, but as we will demonstrate it will be much cheaper than keeping the complete information about individual locations.

2.1.3I do not know but can find out: Queries

The discussion in the above section (2.1.2) indicates that the database will not usually know the precise location of each user. If the precise location is needed by a query some extra work is needed. This leads to a new paradigm of query processing which involves acquisition of new information in the run time of the query. As we said in the section (2), our queries can range from simple ones such as where is X to more complex ones like Find me a doctor near the campus or Find A, B and C such that all of them are on the same highway and B is between A and C. These queries differ in the complexity of Z location constraints - i.e., constraints which involve individual location of users. For example, the query Find me a doctor near the campus has one non-location based constraint (doctor) and another which is a unary constraint on location. The query Find A, B and C such that all of them are on the same highway and B is between A and C involves a more complex constraint - a ternary one (between) plus three unary constraints involving individual locations (on the highway). Generally, one can get even more complex queries which should recognize patterns of moving objects. The main new problem arising in query processing in the presence of imprecise knowledge about locations of users can be summarized as follows: How to minimize the communication cost to find out the missing information necessary to answer the query? Without loss of generality we will assume a domain calculus query language. We will concentrate on describing the evaluation strategy for queries written in a pseudo SQL form. In the next section we are briefly explain about ATIS for location dependent querying.

3. Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS)

Genesis and ATIS are being developed under the umbrella of the Intelligent Transportation Systems to facilitate various kinds of travel, including daily commuting to work via private or public transportation and visiting new places and points of attraction. Travelers are naturally mobile, and the most effective way to disseminate information to travelers is with wireless communication, which is being explored by the Genesis project in Minnesota. The travelers can use personal communication devices including pagers and portable computers (e.g. Apple Newton) to avail themselves of the ATIS services provided by Genesis. Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) is one facet of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) [4], which are currently being developed to improve the safety and efficiency of automobile travel. ATIS assist travelers with planning, perception, analysis and decisionmaking to improve the convenience, safety and efficiency of travel. ATIS applications create a shared resource for efficient data integration and dissemination ATIS obtain information from different sources, including traffic reports, scheduled traffic events, sensors, and maps. Periodic sensor data might lead to high update rates. The clients of the database include travelers on the road, mobile persons with hand-held or portable PCDs (personal communication devices), and users who access information via computers at home, the office, shopping mall or information center. ATIS provides updated information on weather and road conditions, detours, construction zones, bus schedules, and parking. This information is available prior and during the trip. The users can as a variety of queries, such as recommendations of the most favorable routes from a starting location to a chosen destination. The term favorable may represent minimum travel time, shortest distance, etc. It includes the Traveler Information Service, Pre-trip Travel Information Service, Route-Guidance Service, En-route Traveler Advisory Service, Emergency Notification and Personal Security Service, Information Retrieval and Display Service. The Genesis system includes: data collection stations such as the Traffic Management Center (TMC) and Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the fixed end ATIS database server which stores the data provided by the TMC and MTC along with the history of travel times, bus schedules and fares and other static information, a wireless communication service provider and mobile Personal Communication Devices (PCD) as shown in Figure1. Data is either disseminated by the server as a result of a predetermined transaction or sent at the request of a mobile client. User queries include requests for travel time, roads under construction in a given area, shortest path for a trip, route evaluation and emergency service requests. Events, such as traffic accidents and road hazards are monitored and trigger data dissemination to travelers that need to be warned. Typical triggers warn travelers about congestion and alternative routing. In section 4 continuous same process by using mobile wireless computing environment.

Traffic Information I N P U T S

TMC
Fixed End ATIS Server Wireless Communication Service Provider Mobile PCDs

Traffic Information

MTC Figure1: Genesis Operational View

4. Mobile wireless computing environment

Mobisaic [5] is a World Wide Web information system designed to serve mobile users. Mobisaic extends the WWW by allowing documents to refer and react to the current location of clients. It does so by supporting two new concepts: Dynamic Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and Active Documents. A URL is dynamic if it contains at least a dynamic environment variable that gets substituted with the environment context (e.g., location). For instance a user gets a hyperlink to a document that describes the users current location in a building by placing a dynamic URL in the corresponding WWW that contains the link. When a user selects a dynamic URL in a document, the client browser is responsible for resolving all references to dynamic environment variables within the URL. After this resolution, the browser has a standard URL which can be sent to the server to get the corresponding page. Active documents are Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) documents that enable the client to automatically react to changes in a users mobile computing context. Authors write active documents just like they write standard HTML documents, with the addition of a subscribe command that lists the dynamic environment variables that the client must subscribe when it loads the document. When the variables listed in the command change value, the client must take an action that reloads the current page (with new variables) or another page (marked by a new URL).In the next section we are using ubiquitous computing environment for location dependent querying.

5. Ubiquitous Computing Environment

Mobile and ubiquitous computing requires and can exploit a variety of kinds of location information Just providing a person with access to their normal computing services on a continual basis requires that their location be known to a certain extent. In order to understand the issues of providing location information to a system we have chosen a suite of location-based applications to focus on and have designed and built a location infrastructure in support of them. The applications we have built or prototype includes the following: Visitor guidance: Guide a person to a designated location. Migrating windows: Migrate a users windows to a designated location. Note distribution: Send a message to all persons at a given location or set of locations. Ubiquitous Message Delivery (UMD): A message submitted for delivery is delivered at the soonest acceptable time via the most appropriate terminal near the recipient. Acceptable delivery time depends on the context of the recipient. Media Call: A user can request to be connected to one or more other users wherever they currently are by the best means available. Choices include video, audio, and teletype talk connections. As with UMD, users may specify policy constraints that control which kinds of connections may be established under various circumstances. Score board: This application is an information oriented screen saver. When a display is not being used for anything else, it displays information of general interest, but tailored to the interests of the people nearby. Responsive environment: A smart building can optimize its energy usage by exploiting knowledge about which rooms are occupied. It can also control the environmental settings of each room according to the preferences of the people in them. Find Nearest: Find the nearest resource or person matching a given specification, such as color printer or Unix wizard. Locations: Display the current locations of various persons, printers, copiers, etc. A common variant is to show the locations of all nearby persons, printers etc.

6. Active Badges
A solution to the problem of automatically determining the location of an individual has been to design a tag in the form of an Active Badge that emits a unique code for approximately a tenth of a second every 15 seconds (a beacon). These periodic signals are picked up by a network of sensors placed around the host building. A master station also connected to the network, polls the sensors for badge sightings, processes the data, and then makes it available to clients that may display it in a useful visual form. The badge was designed in a package roughly 55 x 55 x 7 millimeters and weighs a comfortable 40 grams.

7. Conclusion
This paper reviews the location dependent querying in mobile computing. The client in a mobile environment can change locations dependent on the positions. To enable location dependent querying we use various environments like Querying in highly mobile distributed environments, ATIS, Mobile wireless computing environment, Ubiquitous Computing Environment, Active Badges.

References
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