Efficient processing of top-k dominating queries in distributed environments

Due to the recent massive data generation, preference queries are becoming an increasingly important for users because such queries retrieve only a small number of preferable data objects from a huge multi-dimensional dataset. A top-k dominating query, which retrieves the k data objects dominating the highest number of data objects in a given dataset, is particularly important in supporting multi-criteria decision making because this query can find interesting data objects in an intuitive way exploiting the advantages of top-k and skyline queries. Although efficient algorithms for top-k dominating queries have been studied over centralized databases, there are no studies which deal with top-k dominating queries in distributed environments. The recent data management is becoming increasingly distributed, so it is necessary to support processing of top-k dominating queries in distributed environments. In this paper, we address, for the first time, the challenging problem of processing top-k dominating queries in distributed networks and propose a method for efficient top-k dominating data retrieval, which avoids redundant communication cost and latency. Furthermore, we also propose an approximate version of our proposed method, which further reduces communication cost. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed methods.