Abstract: | The quality of navigation service is determined by the accuracy of the available data. For existing navigation services, a full map update is provided in order to keep the map data of mobile devices current. As content and services of mobile devices have recently been diversifying, the size of map data managed in mobile devices has increased, reaching several gigabytes in size. It generally takes tens of minutes to write several gigabytes of data into mobile device storage. For traditional navigation systems, a complicated storage structure called a physical storage format (PSF) is used to assure maximum processing performance of map data in mobile devices within limited resources. Consequently, even though modified navigation map data actually affects only a portion of a map, the full map data is updated because partial updates are not possible. In this paper, a navigation system is studied to solve this difficult partial map update problem. The map air update navigation system, which is the result of this study, provides real‐time partial map updating using wireless communications. |