A scalable framework for mobile real-time group communication services

A scalable framework for mobile real-time group communication services is developed in this paper. Examples for possible applications of this framework are mobile social networks, mobile conference calls, mobile instant messaging services, and mobile multi-player on-line games. A key requirement for enabling a real-time group communication service is the tight constraint imposed on the call delivery delay. Since establishing such communication service for a group of independent mobile users under a tight delay constraint is NP-hard, a two-tier architecture is proposed, that can meet the delay constraint imposed by the real-time service requirement for many independent mobile clients in a scalable manner. This goal is achieved by two dimensional partition of the space, first by organization and then geographically. Both the time and memory complexity associated with the location management of N mobile users are O(N) for the location management provided by the proposed framework, while a distributed scheme requires O(N²) for both time and memory complexity.