Hierarchical Location Caching Scheme for Mobile Object Tracking in the Internet of Things

Mobility arises naturally in the Internet of Things networks, since the location of mobile objects, e.g., mobile agents, mobile software, mobile things, or users with wireless hardware, changes as they move. Tracking their current location is essential to mobile computing. To overcome the scalability problem, hierarchical architectures of location databases have been proposed. When location updates and lookups for mobile objects are localized, these architectures become effective. However, the network signaling costs and the execution number of database operations increase particularly when the scale of the architectures and the numbers of databases becomes large to accommodate a great number of objects. This disadvantage can be alleviated by a location caching scheme which exploits the spatial and temporal locality in location lookup. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical location caching scheme, which acclimates the existing location caching scheme to a hierarchical architecture of location databases. The performance analysis indicates that the adjustment of such thresholds has an impact on cost reduction in the proposed scheme.