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

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.