Data Management for Large-Scale Position-Tracking Systems

We propose a distributed data management approach in this paper for a large-scale position-tracking system composed of multiple small systems based on wireless tag technologies such as RFID and Wi-Fi tags. Each of these small systems is called a domain, and a domain server manages the position data of the users belonging to its managing domain and also to the other domains but temporarily residing in its domain. The domain servers collaborate with each other to globally manage the position data, realizing the global position tracking. Several domains can be further grouped to form a larger domain, called a higher-domain, so that the whole system is constructed in a hierarchical structure. We implemented the proposed approach in an experimental environment, and conducted a performance evaluation on the proposed approach and compared it with an existing approach wherein a central server is used to manage the position data of all the users. The results showed that the position data processing load is distributed among the domain servers and the traffic for position data transmission over the backbone network can be significantly restrained. key words: position tracking, position data management, wireless tag technology, large-scale system