Compressed Transmission of Route Descriptions

We present two methods to compress the description of a route in a road network, i.e., of a path in a directed graph. The first method represents a path by a sequence of via edges. The subpaths between the via edges have to be unique shortest paths. Instead of via edges also via nodes can be used, though this requires some simple preprocessing. The second method uses contraction hierarchies to replace subpaths of the original path by shortcuts. The two methods can be combined with each other. Also, we propose the application to mobile server based routing: We compute the route on a server which has access to the latest information about congestions for example. Then we transmit the computed route to the car using some mobile radio communication. There, we apply the compression to save costs and transmission time. If the compression works well, we can transmit routes even when the bandwidth is low. Although we have not evaluated our ideas with realistic data yet, they are quite promising.