Moving objects databases (MODs) store objects’ trajectories by spatiotemporal polylines that approximate the actual movements given by sequences of sensed positions. Determining such a polyline with as few vertices as possible under the constraint that it does not deviate by more than a certain accuracy bound epsilon from the sensed positions is an algorithmic problem known as trajectory reduction.

A specific challenge is online trajectory reduction, i.e. continuous reduction with position sensing in realtime. This particularly is required for moving objects with embedded position sensors whose movements are tracked and stored by a remote MOD.

In this paper, we present Connection-preserving Dead Reckoning (CDR), a new approach for online trajectory reduction. It outperforms the existing approaches by 30 to 50%. CDR requires the moving objects to temporally store some of the previously sensed positions. Although the storage consumption of CDR generally is small, it is not bounded. We therefore further present CDRM whose storage allocation and execution time per position fix can be adjusted and limited. Even with very limited storage allocations of less than 1 kB CDRM outperforms the existing approach by 20 to 40%.