Shortest path discovery in consideration of obstacle in mobile social network environments

© 2018, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. The issue of shortest path discovery in consideration of obstacle is one of the problems for location-based services in mobile social network environments. Currently, most research focuses on quickly discovering the shortest path in obstacle free area with reasonable latency, while the obstacle issue, especially the obstacles that enter temporarily is not fully considered. This creates the need for investigation on shortest path discovery at the same time avoiding detected obstacles. In this paper, a shortest path discovery approach is proposed. The following contributions are made: (1) Modeling the shortest path discovery problem in consideration of obstacle. (2) Discovering the shortest path using an improved A-star algorithm with reasonable latency. (3) Evaluating the accuracy rate of shortest path discovery with acceptable latency for a location-based service in a mobile social network. Experimental results conclusively demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.