Direction-based proximity detection algorithm for location-based services

A context-aware system is one that gracefully adapts to user environment changes, rendering its applications/services more personalized. Location has been long considered as the most important context and numerous location based services have been introduced. Proximity detection is considered as a high level proactive location based function that detects proximity between two mobile users. This function is needed in diverse applications such as dating services, gaming and child tracking. This paper presents direction-based dynamic shifted circle (DDSC) approach which takes users direction as context in providing an efficient proximity detection technique. Simulation experiments proved that DDSC outperforms similar algorithms that have been introduced in literature previously, in terms of the number of messages exchanged.