A dynamic approach to location management in mobile computing systems

Managing location information of mobile nodes is an important issue in mobile computing systems. There is a trade-off between location update effort (when a node moves) and node finding effort. In this paper we present a dynamic location management strategy that has the following features (i) all location servers need not maintain location information about every mobile node, (ii) a coterie based approach is adopted for location update and find, (iii) every node move does not result in location updates, (iv) location updates are done at a subset of location servers, (v) a subset of location servers are queried when a mobile node is to be located, (vi) the set of location servers, corresponding to a mobile node, for location update and find operations is dynamic, (vii) the dynamic nature of these sets helps alleviate situations of heavy burden on some location servers, when a large number of mobile nodes are concentrated in a small geographical area. Thus, location management is done efficiently, and responsibility is shared fairly among location servers.