A Hybrid Spatial Indexing Approach for Navigation Service

The rapid development of the positioning technology and the wireless communication and mobile devices has given rise to the exciting Location Based Services (LBS) technology that has significantly influenced the existing navigational procedures. Motivated by the increasing need to efficiently search through a huge number of service locations (e.g. restaurants, hotels, shops, and more), this paper presents an innovative and efficient spatial index QR-tree, a hybrid index structure of Quadtree and R-tree, instead of the exhaustive search to improve the performance of database queries and update. QR-tree consists of two levels: the upper level is a Quadtree residing in the main memory which partitions the data space and the lower level is disk-resident R-trees assigned to the subspaces resulting from the partition. Computational experiments show that the hybrid index structure is able to reduce query response time by up to 30% and achieve significant improvement on data update over the original R-tree.