When used in an outdoor environment mobile information systems often suffer from the disadvantages of wireless WANs. Hoarding is a method to overcome these disadvantages by transferring information which is probably needed by the user in advance. Existing hoarding mechanisms are either developed for a certain type of application or do not consider the user's location when selecting the information items to hoard. However, exploiting location information can be of great benefit with respect to the achievable hit-ratios.

The hoarding mechanism suggested in this paper is both location-aware and universally applicable. Therefore, it can be used as a generic mechanism in a platform which supports different kinds of mobile information systems. In addition, it can be adapted to different degrees of knowledge about the user's movement.