LeeWave: level-wise distribution of wavelet coefficients for processing kNN queries over distributed streams

We present LEEWAVE − a bandwidth-efficient approach to searching range-specified k-nearest neighbors among distributed streams by LEvEl-wise distribution of WAVElet coefficients. To find the k most similar streams to a range-specified reference one, the relevant wavelet coefficients of the reference stream can be sent to the peer sites to compute the similarities. However, bandwidth can be unnecessarily wasted if the entire relevant coefficients are sent simultaneously. Instead, we present a level-wise approach by leveraging the multi-resolution property of the wavelet coefficients. Starting from the top and moving down one level at a time, the query initiator sends only the single-level coefficients to a progressively shrinking set of candidates. However, there is one difficult challenge in LEEWAVE: how does the query initiator prune the candidates without knowing all the relevant coefficients? To overcome this challenge, we derive and maintain a similarity range for each candidate and gradually tighten the bounds of this range as we move from one level to the next. The increasingly tightened similarity ranges enable the query initiator to effectively prune the candidates without causing any false dismissal. Extensive experiments with real and synthetic data show that, when compared with prior approaches, LEEWAVE uses significantly less bandwidth under a wide range of conditions.