Efficient Cloud-Based Real-Time Geo-Information Delivery for Mobile Users

The increasing popularity of smart mobile devices enables a widespread use of Location Based Services (LBS). LBSs require real-time processing of frequent updating data (i.e., Streams), and return customized results to mobile users based on their own locations. The mobile environment brings additional design and development considerations to LBS applications, such as real-time awareness, energy efficiency, and privacy preservation. In a recent project, we worked on the Emergency Medical Service as an example LBS application, and developed a Cloud-based LBS prototype, named as Early Alert System (EARS), to deliver real-time emergency vehicle´s information to smart mobile devices based on their geo-proximity. EARS leverages Cloud-based stream processing systems to address the real-time stream processing needs, and also develops effective methods to conserve energy consumption and preserve user privacy. EARS is an efficient approach to deliver real-time geo-information from the Cloud to mobile users, and can be easily generalized to other LBS applications in the mobile environment.