Bringing Geospatial Data Closer to Mobile Users: A Caching Approach Based on Vector Tiles for Wireless Multihop Scenarios

Abstract

Mobile applications based on geospatial data are nowadays extensively used to support people’s daily activities. Despite the potential overlap among nearby users’ geospatial data demands, it has not been feasible to share geospatial data with peer wireless devices directly. To address this issue, we designed a scheme based on vector tiles to organize spatial data and proposed a system named GeoTile for geospatial data caching and sharing. In GeoTile, a tile request from the mobile client relies on multihop communication over intermediate nodes to reach the server. Since GeoTile enables all network nodes to cache and process geospatial data tiles, requests may be handled before they actually reach the server. We implement the GeoTile prototype system and conduct comprehensive real-world experiments to evaluate the performance. The result shows that the GeoTile system can serve vector tiles for users conveniently and friendly. In addition, the caching mechanism based on vector tiles can substantially reduce the response time and network throughput under the wireless multihop scenarios.