An Architecture for a Distributed Universal Location Service

| Location information about mobile users or other mobile objects is a valuable input for many applications in mobile computing and wireless communications. As this information is used by an increasing number of applications it is not practical for them to gather the location information themselves, as most systems do now. These applications could be developed much easier if they were based on a universal location service which manages the location information. This location service has to be independent from the applications it is used by and the sources it gathers location sightings from. In this paper we propose an architecture for such a distributed universal location service in the Internet. To increase the availability of the location information, the service is designed to store different copies of the location information of an object with varying accuracy on different servers, depending on the requirements of the applications accessing it.