Adaptive Partitioning and its Applicability to a Highly Scalable and Available Geo-Spatial Indexing Solution

Abstract

Satellite Tracking of People (STOP) tracks thousands of GPS-enabled devices 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. With locations captured for each device every minute, STOP servers receive tens of millions of points each day. In addition to cataloging these points in real-time, STOP must also respond to questions from customers such as, "What devices of mine were at this location two months ago?" They often then broaden their question to one such as, "Which of my devices have ever been at this location?" The processing requirements necessary to answer these questions while continuing to process inbound data in real-time is non-trivial. To meet this demand, STOP developed Adaptive Partitioning to provide a cost-effective and highly available hardware platform for the geographical and time-spatial indexing capabilities necessary for responding to customer data requests while continuing to catalog inbound data in real-time.