GMOBench: Benchmarking generic moving objects

Abstract

In real world scenarios, people's movement include several environments rather than one, for example, road network, pavement areas and indoor. This imposes a new challenge for moving objects database that the complete trip needs to be managed by a database system. In the meantime, novel queries regarding different transportation modes should also be supported. Since existing methods are limited to trips in a single environment and do not support queries on moving objects with different transportation modes, new technologies are essentially needed in a database system. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark called GMOBench that aims to evaluate the performance of a database system managing moving objects in different environments. GMOBench is settled in a realistic scenario and is comprised of three components: (1) a data generator with the capability of creating a scalable set of trips representing the complete movement of humans (both indoor and outdoor); (2) a set of carefully designed and benchmark queries; (3) Mode-RTree, an index structure for managing generic moving objects. The generator defines some parameters so that users can control the characteristics of results. We create the benchmark data in such a way that the dataset can mirror important characteristics and real world distributions of human mobility. Efficient access methods and optimization techniques are developed for query processing. In particular, we propose an index structure called Mode-RTree to manage moving objects in different environments. By employing the proposed index, the cost of benchmark queries is greatly reduced. GMOBench is implemented in a real database system to have a practical result. We perform an extensive experimental study on comprehensive datasets to evaluate the performance. The results show that by using the Mode-RTree we achieve significant performance improvement over the baseline method, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of our approaches.