Buddy tracking - efficient proximity detection among mobile friends

: Global positioning systems (GPS) and mobile phone networks are making it possible to track individual users with an increasing accuracy. It is natural to ask whether one can use this information to maintain social networks. Here each user wishes to be informed whenever one of a list of other users, called the user's friends, appears in the user's vicinity. In contrast to more traditional positioning based algorithms, the computation here depends not only on the user's own position on a static map, but also on the dynamic position of the user's friends. Hence it requires both communication and computation resources. The computation can be carried out either between the individual users in a peer-to-peer fashion or by centralized servers where computation and data can be collected at one central location. In the peer-to-peer model, a novel algorithm for minimizing the number of location update messages between pairs of friends is presented. We also present an effici...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: PERCOM
• Authors: Arnon Amir, Alon Efrat, Jussi Myllymaki, Lingeshwaran Palaniappan, Kevin Wampler
• Keywords: Computation Resources, Global Positioning Systems, Individual Users, PERCOM 2007, Wireless Networks