Achieving Scalability in Hierarchical Location Services

Services for locating mobile objects are often organized as a distributed search tree. The advantage of such an organization is that the service can easily scale as a distributed system grows in size and number of objects. However, a potential problem is that high-level nodes may become a bottleneck, affecting the scalability of the service. A traditional approach to handle such problems is to also distribute the location information managed by a single node across multiple machines. We introduce a method that radically applies distribution of location information such that the load is evenly balanced across all machines that form part of the implementation of the service, while at the same time exploiting locality. Our method is largely independent of the usage and migration patterns of mobile objects.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: COMPSAC
• Authors: Maarten van Steen, Gerco Ballintijn
• Keywords: COMPSAC 2002, Location Information, Mobile Objects, Software Engineering, Time Exploiting Locality