Semantic Geocast Using a Self-organizing Infrastructure

Geocast mechanisms allow a sender to transmit network packets to receivers residing at a certain geographical region. Geocast forms the basis for a number of location-based services, such as announcement services, advertisement services or friend-finders. In this paper, we introduce the notion of semantic geocast, where a target area is specified by its meaning. A sender can broadcast messages to, e.g., a city centre or a specific building, without precisely knowing the physical co-ordinates. We implemented semantic geocast on top of our self-organizing Location Server Infrastructure (LSI), which reflects a location domain model especially designed to cover the needs of mobile users. As our infrastructure is self-organizing, it is flexible and easy to extend. We consider scalability and stability issues. LSI and its geocast mechanism is fully implemented and tested. Evaluations show the effectiveness of our approach.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: IICS
• Authors: Jörg Roth
• Keywords: Certain Geographical Region, Geocast Mechanism, IICS 2003, Semantic Geocast