Rover: Scalable Location-Aware Computing

All the components necessary for realizing location-aware computing are available in the marketplace today. What has hindered the widespread deployment of location-based systems is the lack of an integration architecture that scales with user populations. The authors have completed the initial implementation of Rover, a system designed to achieve this sort of integration and to automatically tailor information and services to a mobile user's location. Their studies have validated Rover's underlying software architecture, which achieves system scalability through high-resolution, application-specific resource scheduling at the servers and network. The authors believe that this technology will greatly enhance the user experience in many places, including museums, amusement and theme parks, shopping malls, game fields, offices, and business centers. They designed the system specifically to scale to large user populations and expect its benefits to increase with them.