Caching in Location Based Services: Approaches, Challenges and Emerging Trends

Location based service (LBS) is related basically to a local, continuous, and spatially confined computation in the context-aware mobile environment. Hitherto, serving a query within the specified timeline becomes possible with the help of caching the data at the client and/or server sites. It enhances the performance of LBSs by the reduction in the network traffic, access latency, server load etc.; however, at the same time, it faces difficulty in maintaining the database consistency as it works in the environment, where frequent disconnections occur. As a result, many fascinating LBS caching issues created in the mobile environment have forced the mobile database specialists and researchers to do extensive research efforts to improve the response time and efficient storage resources by developing the effective location-based technologies. Thus, this study specifically discusses the aforementioned issues with comparative analysis over the common attributes such as highlighting limitations/strength, recent advancement etc. and also possible research directions for the further investigation of the unanswered questions.