Xiulan Yu

LORE: an infrastructure to support location-aware services

With the advance in wireless Internet and mobile computing, location-based services (LBS)--the capability to deliver location-aware content to subscribers on the basis of the positioning capability of the wireless infrastructure--are emerging as key value-added services that telecom operators can offer. To support efficient and effective development and deployment of innovative location-aware applications, a flexible and resilient middleware should be built as the enabling infrastructure. This paper presents the research and efforts made in the IBM China Research Laboratory toward developing an infrastructure that supports location-aware services. This infrastructure is based on a proposed location operating reference model (LORE), which addresses many major aspects of building location-aware services, including positioning, location modeling, location-dependent query processiug, tracking, and intelligent location-aware message notification. Three key components of the infrastructure--the location server, a moving object database, and a spatial publish/subscribe engine--are introduced in detail. The location server has a common location adapter framework that supports heterogeneous positioning techniques and industry-standard location application program interfaces (APIs). The moving object database manages the location stream and processes the location-based queries. The spatial publish/subscribe engine enables intelligent location-aware message notification. We also present some location-aware application demonstrations that leverage the LORE infrastructure. Part of our work has been tested in pilot projects with leading carriers in China and has been integrated into the IBM WebSphere® Everyplace® Suite.

An Approach to Enabling Spatial OLAP by Aggregating on Spatial Hierarchy

Investigation shows that a huge number of spatial data exists in current business databases. Traditional data warehousing and OLAP, however, could not exploit the spatial information to get deep insight into the business data in decision making. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enabling spatial OLAP by aggregating on the spatial hierarchy. A spatial index mechanism is employed to derive the spatial hierarchy for pre-aggregation and materialization, which in turn are leveraged by the OLAP system to efficiently answer spatial OLAP queries. Our prototype system shows that the proposed approach could be integrated easily into the existing data warehouse and OLAP systems to support spatial analysis. Preliminary experiment results are also presented.

45-nm silicon-on-insulator CMOS technology integrating embedded DRAM for high-performance server and ASIC applications

The 45-nm technology, called 12S and developed for IBM POWER7®, is an extremely robust and versatile technology platform that allows for a rich set of features that include embedded dynamic random access memory (DRAM), performance and dense static RAM (SRAM), a trench-based decoupling capacitor, a comprehensive device menu, and a high-performance hierarchical back-end interconnect scheme, all built on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate. Embedded DRAM was implemented for production in high-performance SOI for the first time and allowed us to leapfrog two generations of conventional SRAM densities. Immersion lithography was also employed for the first time in 45-nm IBM products. Our 45-nm design point represents a judicious leverage of silicon oxynitride dielectrics, scaled device technology, and rich features to yield chip-level performance enhancement of more than 50%, compared with our 65-nm node at comparable or less power. This paper describes the salient features of this technology node, the process architecture, the device design rationale, and the process design interactions.

WSCE: a flexible Web Service Composition Environment

In this paper, we propose the concepts of virtual partner and inspector into the Web services composition. Virtual partner, as an IT level concept, is a Web service (pseudo Web service) using the same interface with the actual partner but different binding message. A virtual partner can be invoked directly by a business process described by BPEL, so that the BPEL programmer can test both applications functionality and non functionality performance early in the development cycle to avoid any problems in the final runtime, or test the selection of their partners in business level design. The IT virtual partners provide developers with a range of the techniques which let them explore every aspect of their program. Inspector is proposed when using the third-party process engine. An inspector itself is also a Web service. The programmer can register any required output information in it. The IT virtual partner and the inspector concepts have been integrated in our WSCE, a flexible Web Services Composition Environment for a business process. WSCE is a prototype of autonomic modeling and simulation environment. With the help of a third-party BPEL engine, it provides programmer with concepts and tools to facilitate business process programming.

CAMEL: A Moving Object Database Approach for Intelligent Location Aware Services

Advances in wireless Internet and mobile computing require a new service model for location aware services supporting push services and personalization services based on mobility patterns of mobile users. This paper presents a prototype of CAMEL (Continuous, Active Monitor Engine for Location-based Services), a high performance location management engine to support such intelligent location aware services. We introduce the location model employed by CAMEL, the component architecture and key components of CAMLE, including a Database component, Location Listener, Query Engine, Location Filter, Trigger Handler and Data Server. The component-based architecture facilitates easy deployment of CAMEL for meeting different service model, such as push service, moving object monitor and moving object data warehousing. Two spatial trigger processing mechanisms for Single Moving Object Trigger and Binary Moving Object Trigger, which play an important role in push-based location aware service, are presented in detail and their performance is analyzed.

Managing location stream using moving object database

Advances in wireless Internet and mobile computing require a new service model for location aware services to support push services and personalization services based on mobility patterns of mobile users. This paper presents a prototype of CAMEL (Continuous, Active Monitor Engine for Location-based Services), a high performance location stream engine to manage large numbers of moving objects in support of intelligent location aware services. We introduce the location model employed by CAMEL, the component architecture and key components of CAMEL, including a Database component, Location Listener, Query Engine, Location Filter, Trigger Handler and Data Server. Also we present an enhanced processing algorithm using Max-Velocity constraint for improving performance of Binary Moving Object Trigger.

Filtering location stream in moving object database

One of the challenges to build a high performance moving object database (MOD) is how to efficiently process the location stream which are inserted at a high rate beyond the tolerance of database, while location accuracy needs to be preserved. Based on CAMEL, an MOD prototype implemented in IBM China Research Lab, we present the location filter module and integrate it into the CAMEL to address the issue. The proposed location filter includes two components: the online location filter to filter the location stream online by filtering algorithm plug-ins, and the temporal location manager to insert location data into database at an acceptable insertion rate. An enhanced adaptive location stream filtering algorithm (ALSF) based on the mobility pattern of moving objects, as well as several other filtering algorithms, are also introduced. Experiments with the simulated data show the performance advantage of the enhanced ALSF algorithm.