Essential Technologies for Location-Aware Mobile, Online Map Perfetching and Caching

Map navigation is one of the most popular applications used by mobile users. At the same time, it is also one of the time- and resource-consuming applications. Various methods such as most-recently used and first-in, first-out algorithms are used to reduce the map transmission time and delay. One of the popular methods is online mobile map prefetching and caching. However, the mobility and location features of mobile users are usually left out by these methods. Caching and prefetching maps based on a mobile user’s location would greatly reduce the transmission time and hence the battery power consumption. For example, if a user is visiting a town, prefetching the maps of nearby interesting stores and caching the maps of the visited, neighboring landmarks would help the user’s visitation experience and save the transmission time. Online mobile map prefetching or caching is useful, but is not widely employed because it involves several different subjects and developers usually are not familiar with all of them. This chapter intends to relieve the problem by introducing essential technologies for online mobile map prefetching and caching so more developers can start working on this kind of project or research. It consists of four themes: (1) green handheld computing, (2) location-based services and programming, (3) map tile system, and (4) location-aware map prefetching and caching methods. A summary is given at the end of this chapter.