Architecture and forwarding mech-anism for geo-fencing applications with multiple information providers

Geo-fencing application is a class of location-based service that provide mobile users with services,i.e. information or functionality,when the users are within certain geographical areas. in this paper,we present an architecture for geo-fencing applications that allow information provisioning from multiple providers based on users’ locations. the architecture includes a central component called service router whose main task is to forward information requests from the users’ mobile applications to targeted information providers. the architecture assumes that information is stored in specific content management systems (cmss). we also present a location-based request forwarding mechanism for the service router. every request from the applications must include the users’ location coordinates. these coordinates are used to determine to which information provider the request should be forwarded. in addition,the forwarding mechanism includes a caching mechanism to make efficient the forwarding process. the architecture and forwarding mechanism are implemented in restful web services. this architecture offers three main benefits,i.e.: (i) natural fit to real-world situation,in which each area is administered by an authority,(ii) scalability by delegating the routing tasks to a composition of service routers in a hierarchical architecture,and (iii) consistent presentation by allowing the mobile applications to restructure and reformat information from the providers. © 2016 penerbit utm press. all rights reserved.