A road network modeling method for map matching on lightweight mobile devices

With proliferation of lightweight mobile devices such as mobile phones and explosion of location-based social networking services, there is a growing demand for matching between geographic locations and road networks on mobile devices. Nonetheless, existing methods for map matching only focus on accuracy and/or efficiency improvement, whereas they seldom take into account the capacity for storing map data and energy consumption during the matching process. This paper presents a method that is specifically designed for lightweight mobile devices with limited storage and computing resources, thereby providing an effective solution for map matching on mobile and embedded environments. Extensive experiments were carried out to compare proposed method against traditional approaches. The results indicate that our method can cut down the storage cost for road networks by 75 % compared to traditional methods, with only 3–5 % extra running time, which demonstrates the practical usefulness and superiority of our proposal in real-world mobile applications.