Exploiting location awareness for scalable location-independent object ids
G.C. Ballintijn, Maarten R. van Steen, Andrew S. Tanenbaum · Digital Academic REpository of VU University Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) · 1999
. We are building a wide-area location service that tracks the current location of mobile and replicated objects. The location service should support up to 10 12 objects on a worldwide scale. To support this huge number of objects, the workload of the location service is distributed over multiple nodes. Our load distribution method is unique in that it is aware of the (geographical) location of nodes it uses. Using this location knowledge the distribution mechanism can force locality by the way it distributes the workload. Forcing locality minimizes the use of network resources by the location service and thereby enhances its scalability. We also show how this location-aware load distribution mechanism can be implemented. Keywords: wide-area location services, mobile computing, object identifiers, scalability vrije Universiteit Department of Mathematics and Computer Science 1 Introduction Objects provide an easy way to model both applications and system services. It is therefore e...