Many mobile applications require some knowledge about the current geographic locations of the mobile objects involved. Therefore, services exist that can store and retrieve the position of mobile objects in an efficient and scalable way. More advanced location-aware applications, however, require additional functionality, like determining all mobile objects inside a certain geographic area (range query). This functionality is not supported by existing services on a large scale yet. In this paper, we present a generic large-scale location service. We describe the location service model, defining the semantics of position, range and nearest neighbor queries. A hierarchical distributed architecture is presented, which can efficiently process these queries, and the structure of a main-memory database for efficiently storing and retrieving position information on a location server. Finally, through measurements on a first prototype of this architecture, we show the feasibility of such a location service.
