Top-k Spatial-keyword Publish/Subscribe Over Sliding Window

TL;DR

This paper introduces Skype, a novel system for real-time top-k geo-textual message monitoring over sliding windows, employing innovative indexing and a distributed version to enhance efficiency and scalability.

Contribution

It presents the first study on top-k spatial-keyword publish/subscribe over sliding windows, with new indexing, cost-reduction techniques, and a distributed system implementation.

Findings

Skype achieves real-time top-k monitoring with high efficiency.

DSkype outperforms centralized version by orders of magnitude.

Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of proposed techniques.

Abstract

With the prevalence of social media and GPS-enabled devices, a massive amount of geo-textual data has been generated in a stream fashion, leading to a variety of applications such as location-based recommendation and information dissemination. In this paper, we investigate a novel real-time top-k monitoring problem over sliding window of streaming data; that is, we continuously maintain the top-k most relevant geo-textual messages (e.g., geo-tagged tweets) for a large number of spatial-keyword subscriptions (e.g., registered users interested in local events) simultaneously. To provide the most recent information under controllable memory cost, sliding window model is employed on the streaming geo-textual data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study top-k spatial-keyword publish/subscribe over sliding window. A novel centralized system, called Skype (Topk Spatial-keyword Publish/Subscribe), is proposed in this paper. In Skype, to continuously maintain top-k results for massive subscriptions, we devise a novel indexing structure upon subscriptions such that each incoming message can be immediately delivered on its arrival. To reduce the expensive top-k re-evaluation cost triggered by message expiration, we develop a novel cost-based k-skyband technique to reduce the number of re-evaluations in a cost-effective way. Extensive experiments verify the great efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed techniques. Furthermore, to support better scalability and higher throughput, we propose a distributed version of Skype, namely, DSkype, on top of Storm, which is a popular distributed stream processing system. With the help of fine-tuned subscription/message distribution mechanisms, DSkype can achieve orders of magnitude speed-up than its centralized version.