Concepedia

STR: a simple and efficient algorithm for R-tree packing

Scott T. Leutenegger, Mario A. López, Jeffrey Edgington

2002 · 477 citations · 12 references

TL;DR

The authors evaluate the STR, Hilbert, and nearest‑X R‑tree packing algorithms on synthetic and real datasets from VLSI design, GIS, and computational fluid dynamics, also examining how different buffering levels affect query performance. Experimental comparisons show no single algorithm dominates across all data types, but STR achieves up to 50% fewer disk accesses than the best prior method for point and region queries on uniformly or mildly skewed data, with comparable performance on highly skewed data.

Abstract

Presents the results from an extensive comparison study of three R-tree packing algorithms: the Hilbert and nearest-X packing algorithms, and an algorithm which is very simple to implement, called the STR (Sort-Tile-Recursive) algorithm. The algorithms are evaluated using both synthetic and actual data from various application domains including VLSI design, GIS (Tiger files), and computational fluid dynamics. Our studies also consider the impact that various degrees of buffering have on query performance. Experimental results indicate that none of the algorithms as best for all types of data. In general, our new algorithm requires up to 50% fewer disk accesses than the best previously proposed algorithm for point and region queries on uniformly distributed or mildly skewed point and region data, and approximately the same for highly skewed point and region data.