Collaborative spatial data sharing among mobile lightweight devices

Abstract

Mobile devices are increasingly being equipped with wireless peerto-peer (P2P) networking interfaces, rendering the sharing of data among mobile devices feasible and beneficial. In comparison to the traditional client/server wireless channel, the P2P channels have considerably higher bandwidth. Motivated by these observations, we propose a collaborative spatial data sharing scheme that exploits the P2P capabilities of mobile devices. Using carefully maintained routing tables, this scheme enables mobile devices not only to use their local storage for query processing, but also to collaborate with nearby mobile peers to exploit their data. This scheme is capable of reducing the cost of the communication between mobile clients and the server as well as the query response time. The paper details the design of the data sharing scheme, including its routing table maintenance, query processing and update handling. An analytical cost model sensitive to user mobility is proposed to guide the storage content replacement and routing table maintenance. The results of extensive simulation studies based on an implementation of the scheme demonstrate that the scheme is efficient in processing location dependent queries and is robust to data updates. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.