Given a set of objects and a query q, a point p is
called the reverse k nearest neighbor (RkNN) of q if q is one of
the k closest objects of p. In this paper, we introduce the concept
of influence zone which is the area such that every point inside
this area is the RkNN of q and every point outside this area is not
the RkNN. The influence zone has several applications in location
based services, marketing and decision support systems. It can
also be used to efficiently process RkNN queries. First, we present
efficient algorithm to compute the influence zone. Then, based
on the influence zone, we present efficient algorithms to process
RkNN queries that significantly outperform existing best known
techniques for both the snapshot and continuous RkNN queries.
We also present a detailed theoretical analysis to analyse the
area of the influence zone and IO costs of our RkNN processing
algorithms. Our experiments demonstrate the accuracy of our
theoretical analysis.