Indexing moving points (extended abstract)

Abstract

We propose three indexing schemes for storing a set S of N points in the plane, each moving along a linear trajectory, so that a query of the following form can be answered quickly: Given a rectangle R and a real value tq, report all K points of S that lie inside R at time tq. We first present an indexing structure that, for any given constant ε > 0, uses O(N/B) disk blocks, where B is the block size, and answers a query in O((N/B)1/2+ε + K/B) I/Os. It can also report all the points of S that lie inside R during a given time interval. A point can be inserted or deleted, or the trajectory of a point can be changed, in O(log2B N) I/Os. Next, we present a general approach that improves the query time if the queries arrive in chronological order, by allowing the index to evolve over time. We obtain a trade off between the query time and the number of times the index needs to be updated as the points move. We also describe an indexing scheme in which the number of I/Os required to answer a query depends monotonically on the difference between tq and the current time. Finally, we develop an efficient indexing scheme to answer approximate nearest-neighbor queries among moving points.