MovCloud: A Cloud-enabled Framework to Analyse Movement Behaviors

Understanding human interests and intents from movement data are fundamental challenges for any location-based service. With the pervasiveness of sensor embedded smartphones and wireless networks and communication, the availability of spatio-temporal mobility trace (timestamped location information) is increasingly growing. Analysing these huge amount of mobility data is another major concern. This paper proposes a cloud-based framework named MovCloud to efficiently manage and analyse mobility data. Specifically, the framework presents a hierarchical indexing schema to store trajectory data in different spatio-temporal resolution, clusters the trajectories based on semantic movement behaviour instead of only raw latitude, longitude point and resolves mobility queries using MapReduce paradigm. MovCloud is implemented over Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and an extensive set of experiments on real-life data yield the effectiveness of the proposed framework. MovCloud has achieved similar to 28% better clustering accuracy and also executed three times faster than the baseline methods.