Detailed Design of Uber

Let’s look at the detailed design of our Uber system and learn how the various components work together to offer a functioning service:

Components

Let’s discuss the components of our Uber system design in detail.

Location manager

The riders and drivers are connected to the location manager service. This service shows the nearby drivers to the riders when they open the application. This service also receives location updates from the drivers every four seconds. The location of drivers is then communicated to the QuadTree map service to determine which segment the driver belongs to on a map. The location manager saves the last location of all drivers in a database and saves the route followed by the drivers on a trip.

QuadTree map service

The QuadTree map service updates the location of the drivers. The main problem is how we deal with finding nearby drivers efficiently.

We’ll modify the solution discussed in the Yelp chapter according to our requirements. We used QuadTreesA QuadTree is a tree data structure in which each internal node has exactly four children. QuadTrees are the two-dimensional analog of octrees and are most often used to partition a two-dimensional space by recursively subdividing it into four quadrants or regions. The data associated with a leaf cell varies by application, but the leaf cell represents a “unit of interesting spatial information”. Source: Wikipedia on Yelp to find the location. QuadTrees help to divide the map into segments. If the number of drivers exceeds a certain limit, for example, 500, then we split that segment into four more child nodes and divide the drivers into them.

Each leaf node in QuadTrees contains segments that can’t be divided further. We can use the same QuadTrees ...