An Inverted Index-Based Buffered Search Algorithm for Mobile Navigation Services

As mobile device technologies continue to evolve, they can execute various services which are traditionally executed on more powerful machines. Among these services, a representative example is a navigation service. Enabling such a mobile phone-based navigation service requires a technology of generating a buffered map which includes polygons, polylines and points within a specific distance along a route. This operation is called a buffered search operation which is a key component of navigation services for mobile devices which store no maps for navigation services in advance. Although traditional algorithms work well for other services such as GIS CAD and so on, they do not meet the efficiency requirements of a mobile phone- based navigation service. After revealing the strong performance shortcomings of the previous algorithm, we present a novel inverted index-based algorithm which is enabling mobile phone-based navigation services. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the significant performance improvement over the previous algorithm.