Mill: A Geographical Location Oriented Overlay Network Managing Data of Ubiquitous Sensors

SUMMARY With the rapid rise in the demand for location related service, communication devices such as PDAs or cellar phones must be able to search and manage information related to the geographical location. To leverage location-related information is useful to get an in-depth perspective on environmental circumstances, such as traffic conditions or weather information. To handle the large number of information and queries communication devices generate in the current ubiquitous environment, some scalable mechanism must be required. DHTs and some overlay networks supporting range search are proposed. However, these overlay networks can not process queries of geographical region search. In this paper, we propose a overlay network called “Mill” which can efficiently manage information related to the geographical location. In DHT based overlay networks, each node has responsibility to manage a part of the whole hash table. DHTs provide scalable systems and support fast search. However, DHTs are not good at solving geographical search (range search), because hash function only supports exact match. In the Mill network, each node manages a part of ID-space calculated by “Z-ordering,” which represents squire surface of the earth. This structure of ID-space enables to process region queries easily and fast. And Mill supports any scale of region search. We evaluate proposed system by using traffic infomation generator called “HAKONIWA.” Simulation results show that the performance of Mill is good as well as other DHT systems. In addtion, Mill provedes more efficient region search than other overlay networks supporting range search.