Mobile Intelligence

4.1 INTRODUCTION

Emerging mobile applications such as location-based services, mobile commerce, games, and entertainment services exhibit communication patterns for which existing transport layer communication primitives are ill-suited. These applications produce massive volumes of data and require sophisticated interaction patterns, such as many-to-many communication, which necessitate powerful and efficient filtering and routing capabilities. Furthermore, mobile devices are typically resource constrained and highly dynamic, which presents a challenge in developing a communication infrastructure that scales with network traffic and size.

The distributed content-based publish/subscribe communication paradigm addresses the requirements of emerging mobile applications. The loose coupling among participants supports mobility seamlessly at the messaging layer. Also, an expressive, declarative language allows for fine-grained message filtering, complex interactions, and scalable, efficient routing of messages to mobile nodes.

In this chapter, Section 4.2 first provides some context for the discussion by describing a sample of mobile applications of interest and extracts the key characteristics of these applications. These characteristics are used to motivate the requirements of a communication infrastructure for these applications. Section 4.3 describes the publish/subscribe model, which addresses the above requirements, and Section 4.4 presents algorithms to efficiently support mobility ...