Replication of location information in mobile networks using sliding frames

This paper proposes a new strategy for storing location information of mobile hosts in distributed location information databases along with a scheme for retrieving the location information of mobile hosts. A number of consecutively numbered databases are arranged into a frame of databases. A frame of databases overlaps with the next frame except one database. The location information of a mobile host is replicated and stored in the databases in the same frame. When the location area of a mobile host changes, the new location information is stored in the next frame of databases. This strategy is referred to as the sliding-frame strategy. We show that the proposed sliding-frame strategy yields significantly lower cost for updating and querying the location information databases than the strategies proposed by G. Krishnamurthi et al. (see Proc. 4th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, 1998; Proc. IEEE ICC´99, p.1768-72, 1999)