LASPD: A Framework for Location-Aware Service Provision and Discovery in Mobile Environments

In this paper, we propose a three-tier framework for Location-Aware Service Provision and Discovery (LASPD), with special emphasis on mobile service provisioning. In the first tier, the world is geographically divided into autonomous areas to facilitate local service administration and management. In the second tier, service providers of an area with adequate computing capability are organized into a structured peer-to-peer network. The third tier supports mobile service providers equipped with less capable devices such as smart phones or PDAs. These providers are allowed to delegate their services to one of the designated peer nodes of the second tier, known as "proxy". In LASPD, the location-awareness is achieved during a service discovery by exploiting the locality-preserving property of the Hilbert space filling curve. Besides, we leverage on our previously proposed rewiring mechanism to make the network navigable and self-organized. To have a better understanding of the framework characteristics, we conduct simulations to study the routing behaviors of peer nodes in different tiers as well as measuring the performance of the prototype in real-world environments.