Location Caching in the Mobile Middleware Platform

The location of the mobile user is fundamental to all location-based services. To enable these services the mobile middleware platform needs to access the user’s location. Today a number of vendors like Ericsson and Nokia can provide mobile positioning services (MPS) that can be used to locate the user’s mobile device. Push services, triggered by the user’s location, also put heavy demands on the MPS. GPS technology and network based positioning has been researched in detail. Great strides are being made in improving the performance and accuracy of determining the position of a mobile device. This paper looks at performance and scalability issues in accessing the positioning information from the middleware platform. We discuss an implementation where we allow the application to specify the accuracy of positioning required and then use the user’s current location and velocity to determine the location caching policy.