Mobile Intelligence

8.4 CONCLUSION

This chapter identified the inherent uncertainty in the movement of mobiles in areas covered by wireless networks and the problems caused to resource allocation due to this uncertainty. Starting from this fundamental observation, it subsequently recognized the benefits of being able to forecast the future locations of the mobile hosts. This ability could be used to act proactively, instead of reactively, to many situations. For instance, having estimates of future positions of mobile hosts, the network could take appropriate decisions regarding the bandwidth that will allocate to the cells containing these locations. In addition, in wireless ad hoc networks, where communication between nodes is performed on a store-and-forward basis for nodes not in close proximity, the communication could be deferred until the nodes come closer to each other, thus saving network resources, like precious bandwidth and storage space in the intermediate nodes, reducing packet collisions, and so on.

However, predictive location tracking can be performed only if the mobiles' movements exhibit some degree of regularity, thus making the construction of mobility models feasible. The generic principle governing location prediction can be summarized in a short sentence: study the present and project to the future. Exploiting this principle, the issue of location prediction turned out to be a matter of recording the present mobile trajectories and developing mobility models from these. The ...