“Cache and Carry” for Location Management in Mobile Information Systems

Recent development of hardware technologies such as communication medium which advances from wired to wireless has led to the emergence of mobile information systems. A major problem in such a mobile information system is how to locate mobile clients. This is named the location management issue. Two major costs are involved in managing a mobile client's location: the movement cost and the locating cost. Past methods can only minimize one of the two costs, but not both. The major contribution of this paper is to present methods that minimize both costs simultaneously. Our performance analysis proves that the proposed methods are superior to the past ones.