Buddy tracking --- efficient proximity detection among mobile friends

Global positioning systems (GPS) and mobile phone networks are making it possible to track individual users with an increasing accuracy. It is natural to ask whether one can use this information to maintain social networks. Here each user wishes to be informed whenever one of a list of other users, called the user’s friends, appears in his or her vicinity. In contrast to more traditional positioning based algorithms, the computation here depends not only on the user’s own position on a static map, but also on the dynamic position of the user’s friends. Hence it requires both communication and computation resources. The computation can be carried out either between the individual users in a peer-to-peer fashion or by centralized servers where computation and data can be collected at one central location. In the peer-to-peer model, a novel algorithm for minimizing the number of location update messages between pairs of friends is presented. We also present an efficient algorithm for the centralized model, based on region hierarchy and quad-trees. The paper provides analysis of the algorithms and an evaluation with a comparison between the two algorithms using the City Simulator system.