Recursive tilings and space-filling curves with little fragmentation

Abstract

This paper defines the Arrwwid number of a recursive tiling (or space-filling curve) as the smallest number w such that any ball Q can be covered by w tiles (or curve sections) with total volume O(vol(Q)). Recursive tilings and space-filling curves with low Arrwwid numbers can be applied to optimise disk, memory or server access patterns when processing sets of points in d-dimensional space. This paper presents recursive tilings and space-filling curves with optimal Arrwwid numbers. For d >= 3, we see that regular cube tilings and space-filling curves cannot have optimal Arrwwid number, and we see how to construct alternatives with better Arrwwid numbers.

Manuscript accompanying abstract in EuroCG 2010, including full proofs, 20 figures, references, discussion etc