Online Tracking of Mobile Users

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of maintaining a distributed directory server, that enables us to keep track of mobile users in a distributed network. The paper introduces the graph-theoretic concept of regional matching, and demonstrates how fining a regional matching with certain parameters enables efficient tracking. A polynomial-time algorithm that constructs such a regional matching is presented. The communication overhead of our tracking mechanism is within a polylogarithmic factor of the lower bound.