Route-saver: Leveraging route APIs for accurate and efficient query processing at location-based services

Location-based services (LBS) enable mobile users to query points-of-interest (e.g., restaurants, cafes) on various features (e.g., price, quality, variety). In addition, users require accurate query results with up-to-date travel times. Lacking the monitoring infrastructure for road traffic, the LBS may obtain live travel times of routes from online route APIs in order to offer accurate results. Our goal is to reduce the number of requests issued by the LBS significantly while preserving accurate query results. First, we propose to exploit recent routes requested from route APIs to answer queries accurately. Then, we design effective lower/upper bounding techniques and ordering techniques to process queries efficiently. Also, we study parallel route requests to further reduce the query response time. Our experimental evaluation shows that our solution is three times more efficient than a competitor, and yet achieves high result accuracy (above 98 percent).