LIRA: Lightweight, Region-aware Load Shedding in Mobile CQ Systems

Abstract

Position updates and query re-evaluations are two predominant, costly components of processing location-based, continual queries (CQs) in mobile systems. To obtain high-quality query results, the query processor usually demands receiving frequent position updates from the mobile nodes. However, processing frequent updates oftentimes causes the query processor to become overloaded, under which updates must be dropped randomly, bringing down the quality of query results, negating the benefits of frequent position updates. In this paper, we develop LIRA − a lightweight, region-aware load-shedding technique for preventively reducing the position-update load of a query processor, while maintaining high-quality query results. Instead of having to receive too many updates and then randomly drop some of them, LIRA uses a region-aware partitioning mechanism to identify the most beneficial shedding regions to cut down the position updates sent by the mobile nodes within those regions. Based on the number of mobile nodes and queries in a region, LIRA judiciously applies different amounts of update reduction for different regions, maintaining better overall accuracy of query results. Experimental results show that LIRA is vastly superior to random update dropping and clearly outperforms other alternatives that do not possess full-scale, region-aware load-shedding capabilities. Moreover, due to its lightweight nature, LIRA introduces very little overhead.