On the design of a location and query management strategy for mobile and wireless environments

The rapid development of wireless digital communication technology led to a new computing environment known as mobile or nomadic computing. Mobile com puting no longer requires users to confine to wired network premises, but r ather it enables users to access information regardless of their location. Mobility of mobile users poses a new class of problems in the fields of net working, operating systems, and databases. Location management and location dependent query processing are major challenges in mobile computing. Locat ion management addresses the issue of continuously keeping track of the loc ation of each user. This article presents the architecture for the location and query management based on distributed databases and distributed object management standards. The architecture is implemented using the common obj ect request broker architecture (CORBA) and mobile IP standards. (C) 1999 E lsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.