Internet and mobile computing, location-based services (LBS)-the capability to deliver location-aware content to subscribers on the basis of the positioning capability of the wireless infrastructure-are emerging as key value-added services that telecom operators can offer. To support efficient and effective development and deployment of innovative location-aware applications, a flexible and resilient middleware should be built as the enabling infrastructure. This paper presents the research and efforts made in the IBM China Research Laboratory toward developing an infrastructure that supports location-aware services. This infrastructure is based on a proposed location operating reference model (LORE), which addresses many major aspects of building location-aware services, including positioning, location modeling, location-dependent query processing, tracking, and intelligent location-aware message notification. Three key components of the infrastructure-the location server, a moving object database, and a spatial publish/subscribe engine-are introduced in detail. The location server has a common location adapter framework that supports heterogeneous positioning techniques and industrystandard location application program interfaces (APIs). The moving object database manages the location stream and processes the location-based queries. The spatial publish/subscribe engine enables intelligent location-aware message notification. We also present some location-aware application demonstrations that leverage the LORE infrastructure. Part of our work has been tested in pilot projects with leading carriers in China and has been integrated into the IBM WebSphere Everyplace Suite.

Today, data centers are being built with more entities on a larger scale in order to satisfy the rapid growth of services and the demand for efficient service delivery and management. These data centers are facing scalability, manageability, and consumability challenges that require breakthrough technology for design and management. This paper extends previous work that focused on using virtual appliances for service management, by describing the following areas: 1) rapid provisioning, which simplifies and accelerates the deployment and activation of virtual appliances by checking parameter dependencies and coordinating execution sequences; 2) selective presentation, which provides flexible interfaces to present meaningful information through customized metrics; 3) simplified operation, which enables different operation granularities by coordinating the operation sequences across virtual appliances; and 4) automated consolidation, which enables automated service performance management by automatically monitoring and optimizing resource allocations. In addition, we describe the design and prototype of an extendable management framework, virtualization integrator (VSI), which enables an appliance builder to easily fulfill the key features of virtual appliances and coordinate management function across components located in multiple virtual appliances. By reinventing virtual appliances with built-in management capability, data center management is radically simplified and automated. The results, improved server utilization and simplified system manipulation, demonstrate the potential for virtual appliances to be fundamental building blocks for large-scale data centers and potentially for cloud-based new enterprise data centers.