A Peer-to-Peer Data Structure for Dynamic Location Data

The collection of and search for location information is a core component in many pervasive and mobile computing applications. In distributed collaboration scenarios this location data is collected by different entities, e.g., users with GPS enabled mobile phones. Instead of using a centralized service for managing this distributed dynamic location data, we present a new peer-to-peer data structure, the so-called distributed space partitioning tree (DSPT). A DSPT is a general use peer-to-peer data structure, similar to distributed hash tables (DHTs), that allows publishing, updating of, and searching for geometrical objects.