Indexing Moving Objects Using Short-Lived Throwaway Indexes

Abstract

With the exponential growth of moving objects data to the Gigabyte range, it has become critical to develop effective techniques for indexing, updating, and querying these massive data sets. To meet the high update rate as well as low query response time requirements of moving object applications, this paper takes a novel approach in moving object indexing. In our approach we do not require a sophisticated index structure that needs to be adjusted for each incoming update. Rather we construct conceptually simple short-lived throwaway indexes which we only keep for a very short period of time (sub-seconds) in main memory. As a consequence, the resulting technique MOVIES supports at the same time high query rates and high update rates and trades this for query result staleness. Moreover, MOVIES is the first main memory method supporting time-parameterized predictive queries. To support this feature we present two algorithms: non-predictive MOVIES and predictive MOVIES. We obtain the surprising result that a predictive indexing approach — considered state-of-the-art in an external-memory scenario — does not scale well in a main memory environment. In fact our results show that MOVIES outperforms state-of-the-art moving object indexes like a main-memory adapted B^x-tree by orders of magnitude w.r.t. update rates and query rates. Finally, our experimental evaluation uses a workload unmatched by any previous work. We index the complete road network of Germany consisting of 40,000,000 road segments and 38,000,000 nodes. We scale our workload up to 100,000,000 moving objects, 58,000,000 updates per second and 10,000 queries per second which is unmatched by any previous work.