Customized architectures for faster route finding in GPS-based navigation systems

  • Authors:
  • Jason Loew;Dmitry Ponomarev;Patrick H. Madden

  • Affiliations:
  • SUNY Binghamton Computer Science Department, USA;SUNY Binghamton Computer Science Department, USA;SUNY Binghamton Computer Science Department, USA

  • Venue:
  • SASP '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 8th Symposium on Application Specific Processors (SASP)
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

GPS based navigation systems became popular in dedicated handheld devices, and are now also found in modern cell phones, and other small personal devices. A key element of any navigation system is fast and effective route finding, and this depends heavily on Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. Dijkstra's algorithm is serial in nature; prior efforts to accelerate it through parallel processing have had almost no success. In this paper, we present a practical approach to extract small-scale parallelism by shifting priority queue operations to a secondary tightly-coupled processor. We obtain a substantial speedup on real-world graphs (in particular, road maps), allowing the development of navigation systems that are more responsive, and also lower in total power consumption.