The coming years will witness dramatic advances in wireless communications as well as positioning technologies. As a result, tracking the changing positions of objects capable of continuous movement is becoming increasingly feasible and necessary. The present paper proposes a novel, R # -tree based indexing technique that supports the efficient querying of the current and projected future positions of such moving objects. The technique is capable of indexing objects moving in one-, two-, and three-dimensional space. Update algorithms enable the index to accommodate a dynamic data set, where objects may appear and disappear, and where changes occur in the anticipated positions of existing objects. A comprehensive performance study is reported.

With the proliferation of wireless communications and the rapid advances in technologies for tracking the positions of continuously moving objects, algorithms for efficiently answering queries about large numbers of moving objects increasingly are needed. One such query is the reverse nearest neighbor (RNN) query that returns the objects that have a query object as their closest object. While algorithms have been proposed that compute RNN queries for non-moving objects, there have been no proposals for answering RNN queries for continuously moving objects. Another such query is the nearest neighbor (NN) query, which has been studied extensively and in many contexts. Like the RNN query, the NN query has not been explored for moving query and data points. This paper proposes an algorithm for answering RNN queries for continuously moving points in the plane. As a part of the solution to this problem and as a separate contribution, an algorithm for answering NN queries for continuously moving points is also proposed. The results of performance experiments are reported.

With the continued proliferation of wireless networks, e.g., based on such evolving standards as WAP and Bluetooth, visionaries predict that the Internet will soon extend to billions of wireless devices, or objects. A substantial fraction of these will offer their changing positions to the (location-based) services, they either use or support. As a result, software technologies that enable the management of the positions of objects capable of continuous movement are in increasingly high demand. This paper assumes what we consider a realistic Internet-service scenario where objects that have not reported their position within a specified duration of time are expected to no longer be interested in, or of interest to, the service. In this scenario, the possibility of substantial quantities of "expiring" objects introduces a new kind of implicit update, which contributes to rendering the database highly dynamic. The paper presents an R-tree based technique for the indexing of the current positions of such objects. Extensive performance experiments explore the properties of the types of bounding regions that are candidates for being used in the internal entries of the index, and they show that, when compared to the approach where the objects are not assumed to expire, the new indexing technique can improve the search performance by as much as a factor of two or more without sacrificing update performance.

In this paper, we propose to study deformable necklaces — flexible chains of balls, called beads, in which only adjacent balls may intersect. Such objects can be used to model macro-molecules, muscles, rope, and other ‘linear ’ objects in the physical world. In this paper, we exploit this linearity to develop geometric structures associated with necklaces that are useful in physical simulations. We show how these structures can be implemented efficiently and maintained under necklace deformation. In particular, we study a bounding volume hierarchy based on spheres built on a necklace. Such a hierarchy is easy to compute and is suitable for maintenance when the necklace deforms, as our theoretical and experimental results show. This hierarchy can be used for collision and self-collision detection. In particular, we achieve an upper bound of O(nlog n) in two dimensions and O(n 2−2/d) in d-dimensions, d ≥ 3, for collision checking. To our knowledge, this is the first sub-quadratic bound proved for a collision detection algorithm using predefined hierarchies. In addition, we show that the power diagram, with the help of some additional mechanisms, can be also used to detect self-collisions of a necklace in certain ways complementary to the sphere hierarchy.

We propose algorithms for maintaining two variants of kd- trees of a set of moving points in the plane. A pseudo kd-tree allows the number of points stored in the two children to di#er by a constant factor.

With the proliferation of wireless communications and geo-positioning, e-services are envisioned that exploit the positions of a set of continuously moving users to provide context-aware functionality to each individual user. Because advances in disk capacities continue to outperform Moore's Law, it becomes increasingly feasible to store on-line all the position information obtained from the moving e-service users. With the much slower advances in I/O speeds and many concurrent users, indexing techniques are of essence in this scenario. Past

Advances in wireless communications, positioning technology, and other hardware technologies combine to enable a range of applications that use a mobile user's geo-spatial data to deliver online, location-enhanced services, often referred to as location-based services. Assuming that the service users are constrained to a transportation network, this paper develops data structures that model road networks, the mobile users, and stationary objects of interest. The proposed framework encompasses two supplementary road network representations, namely a two-dimensional representation and a graph representation. These capture aspects of the problem domain that are required in order to support the querying that underlies the envisioned location-based services.

Rapid, sustained advances in key computing hardware technologies combine to enable a new class of computing services that aim to meet needs of mobile users. These ubiquitous and intelligent services adapt to each user's particular preferences and current circumstances---they are personalized. The services exploit data available from multiple sources, including data on past interactions with the users, data accessible via the Internet, and data obtained from sensors. The user's geographical location is particularly central to these services. We outline

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... reliably and in detail, pertinent properties of artifacts under design. Progress in the area of database-index design thus relies on empirical studies based on prototype implementations of indexes. This paper proposes a benchmark that targets techniques for the indexing of the current and near-future positions of moving objects. This benchmark enables the comparison of existing and future indexing techniques. It covers important aspects of such indexes that have not previously been covered by any benchmark. Notable aspects covered include update efficiency, query efficiency, concurrency control, and storage requirements. Next, the paper applies the benchmark to half a dozen notable moving-object indexes, thus demonstrating the viability of the benchmark and offering new insight into the performance properties of the indexes.