Proximity Services with the Nimbus Framework

Location-based applications and services are getting increasingly important for mobile users. They take into account a mobile user's current location and provide location-dependent output. Currently, location-based applications are mainly provided by mobile phone networks, but we can generalize the idea to other usage scenarios. To support developers of such services, we designed the Nimbus framework, which hides specific details of positioning systems and provides uniform output containing physical as well as semantic information. In this paper, we focus on one important operation provided by the framework called the proximity resolution, described by the question "What is in my proximity?" Our solution takes into account the requirements of clients in mobile environments. Our algorithms are based on a decentralized and self-organizing runtime infrastructure and are highly scalable and accessible for mobile users.

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