Voronoi-Based Continuous $k$ Nearest Neighbor Search in Mobile Navigation

Digital ecosystems are formed by “digital organisms” in complex, dynamic, and interrelated ecosystems and utilize multiple technologies to provide cost-efficient digital services and value-creating activities. A distributed wireless mobile network that serves as the underlying infrastructure to digital ecosystems provides important applications to the digital ecosystems, two of which are mobile navigation and continuous mobile information services. Most information and query services in a mobile environment are continuous mobile query processing or continuous k nearest neighbor (CKNN), which finds the locations where interest points or interest objects change while mobile users are moving. These locations are known as “split nodes.” All of the existing works on CKNN divide the query path into segments, which is a segment of road separated by two intersections, and then, the process to find split nodes is applied to each segment. Since there are many segments (due to many intersections, obviously), processing each segment is naturally inefficient. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution to overcome this problem. We use the Voronoi diagram for CKNN [called Voronoi CKNN (VCKNN)]. Our proposed approach does not need to divide the query path into segments, hence improving the overall query processing performance. Our experiment verified the applicability of the VCKNN approach to solve CKNN queries.