An efficient approach for continuous density queries

摘要

In location-based services, a density query returns the regions with high concentrations of moving objects (MOs). The use of density queries can help users identify crowded regions so as to avoid congestion. Most of the existing methods try very hard to improve the accuracy of query results, but ignore query efficiency. However, response time is also an important concern in query processing and may have an impact on user experience. In order to address this issue, we present a new definition of continuous density queries. Our approach for processing continuous density queries is based on the new notion of a safe interval, using which the states of both dense and sparse regions are dynamically maintained. Two indexing structures are also used to index candidate regions for accelerating query processing and improving the quality of results. The efficiency and accuracy of our approach are shown through an experimental comparison with snapshot density queries.