2012 Second International Conference on Instrumentation & Measurement, Computer, Communication and Control
Location-Based Mobile Search
and The Application of Searching for Hotels
Zhang Leilei1
Software School of Xiamen University
Xiamen, China
zzuzll@126.co m1
Abstract—With the fast evolution of computer technology, the
service from search engines has been providing more and more
convenience to mobile terminals. However, traditional key-word
search engines have their own deficiency on certain areas which
take geographical factors into account. To overcome this
deficiency, this paper discusses about another new type of search,
location-based search. After analyzing the background of
Location-Based Service (LBS ), this paper proposed the
architecture for LBS systems, and put forward a scheme of
constructing server database by using spatial index, and finally
implemented one application of searching for hotels.
Keywords- Mobile Search; Location-Based search; spatial
index
I. INT RODUCT ION
As we all know, mobile terminals’ function has been more
and more reinforced, and mobile users could experience
convenient Location-based service (LBS). With GPS
technology available to our daily life, LBS exposed its great
attractiveness. People are immersed in the happiness of using
LBS, and quite a lot of developers have noticed that LBS could
bring plenty of co mmercial opportunities. In America, for
examp le, ‘Foursquare’ is a very popular website which
provides phone service by using LBS. It was founded in Mar.
2009, and surprisingly the number of its registered users has
climbed to 10,000,000 till June, 2011.
In the coming several years, mobile search service will be a
necessity in our daily life. LBS enable developers to interact
with users’ unique tags [1], and provide users a navigation
system to view photos at a certain place [2]. As well, arbitrary
deployed APs could be searched for indoor wireless
applications [3], LBS could bring many meaningful creativities.
This paper presents the LBS system arch itecture, and discusses
how to imply a geographical search under mobile environ ment,
and designs the method of constructing database server by
using spatial index, and at last implements an application of
searching for hotels.
II. RELAT ED W ORK AND BACKGROUND
In recent years, mobile terminals’ hardware evolves too
fast, and the arising Android operating system has largely
enriched the applicat ions of mobile phones, which enables
civilians to experience certain functions which only exist in
Iphones. And at the same time, mobile network providers are
also upgrading network environment. Current 3G network has
Corresponding Author: Lin Kunhui, Software School of Xiamen
University, China, 361005.
978-0-7695-4935-4/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/IMCCC.2012.157
Lin Kunhui2 , Ye Weichuan3
Software School of Xiamen University
Xiamen, China
khlin@xmu.edu.cn 2 , 670763505@qq.co m3
already taken users a bandwidth of 2 Mb/s, and the coming 4G
network enable users to connect to the Internet with a data
transmission rate of 10Mb/s~20Mb/s.
Traditional mobile search engine is operated with
keyword, and there may have a lot of search results, and don’t
match users’ wish. Consequently, users may have to spend
some time to p ick up useful information fro m the various
search results [4]. So me investigations have shown that LBS
factors would efficiently filter users search results.
Nowadays, Iphones and almost all android devices have
integrated such a GPS chip, which makes Location -Based
Search a reality. LBS is a hot topic in recent years, paper [5]
outline a prototype solution for multimedia mobile phone based
on web search, and paper [6] presents a framework that
supports location-based services on moving objects in road
Networks, and paper [7] studies about the mining and
prediction of mobile movements by using CTMSPs. This paper
emphasizes on the system architecture, especially the search
procedure, which is the key point of mobile search.
III. SYST EM ST RUCT URE
It is obvious that an LBS system contains client and server.
The following Figure 1 shows the search model of location-
based search. Thus, a Wireless Base Station is a GPS receiver
which is able to co mpute mobile terminals’ geographical
location. To enable a mobile search action, one mobile device
should first of all get its geographical location from the base
station, and then send this location information to the server.
After receiving mobile terminal’s search request, the server
will decide a search area that corresponds to the geographical
location and reply the client with the search results which is
most-relevantly ranked [7, 8].
As Mobile Search has its own distinctiveness, search
servers should undertake the most computing task [8]. Since
geographical records are co mbined with two indispensable
parameters, latitude and altitude, the difficulty of implementing
mobile search is how to imp rove the efficiency of searching
among thousands/millions of geographical records. In
traditional thinking, one possible search scheme is to search
fro m the first record to the last record which is quite inefficient.
In fact we can make indexes on geographical locations, just as
we hold indexes on plain data type such as integer, character,
float and so on. In Recent years, several spatial databases have
appeared, and are now available to developers. Spatial index
will be discussed in detail later.
635
644
 Technology synchronizes with the time, and nowadays location and use HTTP protocol to send this information to the
ordinary mobile devices are able to get its geographical server side. Figure 2 shows the system architecture of mobile
location fro m base stations. And developers are capable of search System.
using some simple APIs to get mobile phones’ geographical

Wireless
Location
Mobile Base
Search
Station Network
Applicat Server
ion

Figure1. Search Model

Device Agent is designed to record users’ device parameter, After getting results from the server side, the DTA are able
and determine the data quality and the compression rate which to parse the results data to useful information, and then notify
will return to users’ mobile phones. And as well Device Agent the user interface. Thus, one search process ends.
could remember users’ search history.
IV. SEARCH PROCEDUREE
M obile Terminal
A. Data Storage
Geographical data is another type of data type. Just as
Data Transfer integer, float, or other plain data types, geographical
Device Agent information could be stored in databases. Look at Figure 3 and
Agent
Table 1, you may have a superficial sense of how geographical
data is organized in databases .
Rank
Search Result Querier

… Server Cluster …

Spatial Geographical
Geographical Database
index Records

Figure2. System Architecture

Data Transfer Agent (DTA) is designed to provide data
transfer functions which is implemented by using Http protocol.
Mobile terminals could send data request to the server side Figure3. Locations of Places
conveniently by using Data Transfer Agent. And as well DTA ID Name Location
is designed to receive result data from server, and presents the 1 Xiamen Sheraton Hotel <24.495272,118.128262>
data to relevant application modules [9]. Besides, DTA are able 2 Xiamen Kingty Hotel <24.490585,118.093843>
to get device’s parameter fro m Device Agent, and send the 3 Xiamen Yijing Hotel <24.486211,118.105001>
device information to server side to enable the server determine 4 Jinbao Hotel <24.489726,118.082857>
its search category. 5 Asian Gulf Hotel <24.433241,118.145428>
The Querier is at the server side, and its duty is to 6 Nanfang Hotel <24.454943,118.075787>
determine which co mputer server or wh ich database to search … … …
fro m. The Querier is a very important part in server modules, it Table1. Data Storage
could get user’s phone parameter and device’s geographical
information, and with this informat ion, Querier passes the Indeed, geographical location consists of latitude and
request to the next server module wh ich is aimed at some altitude, and mainstream databases are able to store location
certain areas. information by using this way. Almost every programming
High performance server cluster is widely used, and has language has a data type of POINT, which is the original
been one of the most important computational infrastructures location prototype.
[10]. The Server Cluster is mainly designed to alleviate the
server’s pressure, and it could relay search requests passed by B. Spatial Index
the Querier. Besides, the Cluster is responsible to search from When searching among those many geographical records,
the database and transfer the ranked results to mobile clients. users are most likely to be interested in the records which are

645
636
nearer to them. That means there is no need to search in those
location area records which are too far away. However, one
geographical record always has two essential parameters, X-
AXIS data and Y-AXIS data, and we cannot easily make
indexes like traditional data types. And in traditional thinking
we may hold indexes only in X-AXIS or Y-AXIS, and that is
still an embarrassment.
Luckily, nowadays, most mainstream databases have
reinforced their support on spatial data, and spatial indexes are
allowed to be made. A spatial index is a type of extended index
that allows you to index a spatial colu mn. A spatial colu mn is a
table column that contains data of a spatial data type, such as
geometry or geography [11]. Besides, spatial databases are able Figure5. Customize Spatial Index
to handle features such as how far two points differ and
whether points fall within a spatial area of interest [12]. C. Rank Results
Quite a lot of database products have been becoming to As the number of search results may be very large, the
support spatial indexes, and you can get the products list in server should consider about ranking results before sending to
reference [12]. clients. A server-side ring ranking technique could reduce the
communication cost of exact queries [13]. A good rank
SQL Server 2008 and later versions support spatial data, category will flourish an application, and a bad one will destroy
and spatial indexes are built using B-trees. The fo llowing creativity.
illustration shows the decomposition for the upper-right cell at
score  p1 * dis tan ce _ score  p 2 * keyword _ relative _ score  p3 * evalute _ score
each level of the grid hierarchy into a 4x4 grid. In reality, all 
 p1  p 2  p3  1
the cells are decomposed in this way [11].
Figure6. Rank Algorithm
One way to rank results may like this: the final score
consists of 3 parts: distance score, keyword relative score and
user evaluate score. And each part has its own importance
proportion parameter, represented by p1, p2, p3. These three
parameters are not constancy, and mobile clients’ interactive
click actions will help improve the value of p1, p2, p3.
Figure4. SQL Server Spatial Index
V. EXPERIMENT AL RESULT
Co mponent heads identify the different components of your A simulated experiment was carried out. Just as the figure
paper and are not topically subordinate to each other. Examples
shown below, the application enables users to search hotels by
include Acknowledgments and References and, for these, the setting several filter conditions, such as price, distance and so
correct style to use is “Heading 5”. Use “figure caption” for on. As the server side does not have too many hotel records,
your Figure captions, and “table head” for your table title. Run- the search process does not cost too much time, and the
in heads, such as “Abstract”, will require you to apply a style application performs well.
(in this case, italic) in addition to the style provided by the drop
down menu to differentiate the head from the text.
However, in my opinion, SQL Server’s spatial index could
be a little improved in some degree. Just like the figure above,
spatial database is divided into several levels, and every level’s
grid size is the same. That means all areas are stored in
database using the same density, despite some place’s records
size is too big while others too small. And SQL Server doesn’t
give developers an interface of selecting different grid-density.
This may lead to some inefficient performance in some area
where spatial records is unbalanced.
Maybe spatial index can be improved by using the
following method: every level’s every grid has its own grid
manager, and this manager’s duty is to locate the given point’s
grid and pass the search task to the next level’s grid manager.
Every grid has no need to have the same level size, and
theoretically this will improve the search efficiency.

Figure7. Hotel Search Application

646
637
 VI. CONCLUDE
Aim at the distinctiveness of mobile search environment,
this paper designs one search architecture for LBS, and
proposed the thought of constructing spatial index to improve
search efficiency. And finally implements an application of
searching for hotels, which uses spatial index to construct
background database. Hope this paper useful to mobile
developers.
VII. A CKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the Xiamen Digital Media and
Creat ive Industries Engineering Center Project : Research on
3D Animat ion Co mmon Develop ment Platform based on
Ubiquitous Network, and this paper’s Corresponding author is
Lin Kunhui, Software School of Xiamen University, and his
email address is˖khlin@xmu.edu.cn.
[1] Jinhyuk Choi • Bongkyu Jang • Gerard J. Kim. Organizing and
presenting geospatial tags in location-based augmented reality. Pers
Ubiquit Comput (2011) 15:641–647.
[2] Anna Wu, Xiaolong(Luke) Zhang. Location-based Information Fusion
for Mobile Navigation. ACM 978-1-4503-0630-0/11/09 2011.
[3] Seong Yun Cho. Localization of the Arbitrary Deployed Aps for Indoor
Wireless Location-Based Applications. IEEE Transactions on Consumer
Electronics, Vol. 56, No. 2, May 2010.
647
638
[4] Church, Karen; Smyth, Barry; Bradley, Keith; Cotter, Paul. A Large
Scale Study of European Mobile Search Behaviour. MobileHCI 2008.
[5] Pasi Fränti, Andrei Tabarcea, Juha Kuittinen and Ville Hautamäki.
Location-Based Search Engine for Multimedia Phones. ICME 2010.
[6] Zhenghua Xue, Xiaoshe Dong, Shengqun Fan. A Novel Dual-Index
Design to Efficiently Support Snapshot Location-Based Query
Processing in Mobile Environments. 978-1-4244-2358-3/08, 2008 IEEE.
[7] Lu, Eric Hsueh-Chan; Tseng, Vincent S. Mining Cluster-Based
Temporal Mobile Sequential Patterns in Location-Based Service
Environments.
[8] Feng Gui, Malek Adjouadi, Naphtali Rishe. Personalized Approach for
Mobile Search. 2009 World Congress on Computer Science and
Information Engineering.
[9] Ciprian M. Dobre, Ramiro Voicu, Adrian Muraru and Iosif C. Legrand,
An Agent Based Framework to Monitor and Control High Performance
Data Transfers. EUROCON 2007 The International Conference on
“Computer as a T ool”.
[10] Haojun Wang, Roger Zimmermann. A Novel Management Architecture
for Large-scale Server Cluster. IEEE TRANSACT IONS ON MOBILE
COMPUTING, VOL. 9, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2010.
[11] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895265.aspx
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_index#Spatial_index
[13] Man LUNG YIU, CHARISTIAN S.JENSEN, JESPER MØLLER, HUA
LU. Design and Analysis of a Ranking Approach to Private Location-
Based Services. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, Vol. 0, No. 0,
Article 00, Publication date: 2011