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.
We are given a two-dimensional square grid of size N×N, where N∶=2n and n≥0. A space filling curve (SFC) is a numbering of the cells of this grid with numbers from c+1 to c+N2, for some c≥0. We call a SFC recursive (RSFC) if it can be recursively divided into four square RSFCs of equal size. Examples of well-known RSFCs include the Hilbert curve, the z-curve, and the Gray code.