k-Nearest Neighbor Query Processing Algorithms for a Query Region in Road Networks

Recent development of wireless communication technologies and the popularity of smart phones are making location-based services (LBS) popular. However, requesting queries to LBS servers with users’ exact locations may threat the privacy of users. Therefore, there have been many researches on generating a cloaked query region for user privacy protection. Consequently, an efficient query processing algorithm for a query region is required. So, in this paper, we propose k-nearest neighbor query (k-NN) processing algorithms for a query region in road networks. To efficiently retrieve k-NN points of interest (POIs), we make use of the Island index. We also propose a method that generates an adaptive Island index to improve the query processing performance and storage usage. Finally, we show by our performance analysis that our k-NN query processing algorithms outperform the existing k-Range Nearest Neighbor (kRNN) algorithm in terms of network expansion cost and query processing time.