Supporting Location-Awareness in Open Distributed Systems

Abstract

Mobile computers and communication devices are establishing themselves as ubiquitous features of daily life. This development is linked to tremendous growth in the number and sophistication of mobile and mobile-aware software applications. Increasingly, such applications need access to information about their own and other objects' physical locations, a requirement known as location-awareness. Existing location-aware applications and systems are typically tailored to a particular type of positioning technology. This is unsatisfactory considering that no technology provides ubiquitous coverage. Equally, there are few accepted models and abstractions for building location-aware applications, making their design and implementation costly and error-prone. Location-awareness raises legitimate concerns about personal and organisational privacy. These vary widely across administrative and application domains. Hence, there is a need to find a model allowing a balance between protection and fu...