Estimating the Benefit of Location-Awareness for Mobile Data Management Mechanisms

With the increasing popularity of mobile computing devices, the need to access information in mobile environments has also grown rapidly. In order to support such mobile information accesses, location-based services and mobile information systems often rely on location-aware data management mechanisms like location-aware caching, data dissemination or prefetching. As we explain in this paper, the location-awareness of such mechanisms is only useful, if the accessed information is location-dependent, i.e. if the probability with that a certain information object is accessed depends on the user’s location. Although the location-dependency of the accessed information is crucial for the efficiency of location-aware data management mechanisms and the benefit they can get out of their location-awareness, no metric to measure the location-dependency of information has been proposed so far. In this paper, we describe such a metric together with a second one for a further important characteristic of mobile information accesses, the so-called focus.