Ad-hoc distributed spatial joins on mobile devices

PDAs, cellular phones and other mobile devices are now capable of supporting complex data manipulation operations. Here, we focus on ad-hoc spatial joins of datasets residing in multiple non-cooperative servers. Assuming that there, is no mediator available, the spatial joins must be evaluated on the mobile device. Contrary to common applications that consider the cost at the server side, our main issue is the minimization of the transferred data, while meeting the resource constraints of the device. We show that existing methods, based on partitioning and pruning, are inadequate in many realistic situations. Then, we present novel algorithms that estimate the data distribution before deciding the physical operator independently for each partition. Our experiments with a prototype implementation on a WiFi-enabled PDA, suggest that the proposed methods outperform the competitors in terms of efficiency and applicability.