Decomposition tree: a spatio-temporal indexing method for movement big data

Movement is a complex process that evolves through both space and time. Movement data generated by moving objects is a kind of big data, which has been a focus of research in science, technology, economics, and social studies. Movement database is also at the forefront of geographic information science research. Developing efficient access methods for movement data stored in movement databases is of critical importance. Tree-like indexing structures such as the R-tree, Quadtree, Octree are not suitable for indexing multi-dimensional movement data because they all have high space cost of their inner nodes. In addition, it is difficult to use them for parallel access to multi-dimensional movement data because they thereof, are in hierarchical structures, which have severe overlapping problems in high dimensional space. In this paper, we propose a novel access method, the Decomposition Tree (D-tree), for indexing multi-dimensional movement data. The D-tree is a virtual tree without inner nodes, instead, through an encoding method based on integer bit-shifting operation, and can efficiently answer a wide range of queries. Experimental results show that the space cost and query performance of D-tree are superior to its best known competitors.