Moving peers in distributed, location-based peer-to-peer overlays

Abstract

In the past decades, various concepts of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have been realized in desktop applications for stationary PCs. Last recent years show that computers have evolved to handy devices which can be used nearly everywhere, not only at home. For this reason, location-based services which allow to associate peers in a network with geographical positions, e.g. to track a device in emergency cases, become interesting. In this paper, we introduce LobSter, a lightweight location-based service over unmodified DHTs like Chord [24], Kademlia [14] and Pastry [21] which supports the mobility of peers. Our evaluation compares LobSter to related work in stationary situations and gives insights about the general limits of distributed location-based services in mobile environments.