Searching continuous nearest neighbors in road networks on the air

Recently, people have begun to deal with location-based queries (LBQs) under broadcast environments. To the best of our knowledge, most of the existing broadcast-based LBQ methods are aimed at Euclidean spaces and cannot be readily extended to road networks. This paper takes the first step toward processing Continuous Nearest Neighbor queries in road Networks under wireless Broadcast environments (CN³B). Our method leverages the key properties of Network Voronoi Diagram (NVD). We first present an efficient method to partition the NVD structure of the underlying road networks into a set of grid cells and number the grid cells obtained, based on which we further propose an NVD-based Distributed air Index (NVD-DI) to support CN³B query processing. Finally, we propose an efficient algorithm on the client side to process CN ³B queries. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. The results show that our proposed method is about 4 and 7.6 times more efficient than a less-sophisticated D-tree air index based method, in access latency and tuning time, respectively. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.