The Islands Approach to Nearest Neighbor Querying in Spatial Networks

Much research has recently been devoted to the data management foundations of location-based mobile services. In one important scenario, the service users are constrained to a transportation network. As a result, query processing in spatial road networks is of interest. We propose a versatile approach to k nearest neighbor computation in spatial networks, termed the Islands approach. By offering flexible yet simple means of balancing re-computation and pre-computation, this approach is able to manage the trade-off between query and update performance. The result is a single, efficient, and versatile approach to k nearest neighbor computation that obviates the need for using several k nearest neighbor approaches for supporting a single service scenario. The experimental comparison with the existing techniques uses real-world road network data and considers both I/O and CPU performance, for both queries and updates.