SHG-Tree: an efficient granularity-based spatial index structure

To improve the access efficiency of multidimensional spatial database, this study proposes a new index structure named Space Hypercube Grid Tree (SHG-Tree). By avoiding the problems of node split and recombination, SHG-Tree can efficiently support the common operations over spatial database containing objects with dynamic region. The main contributions of this paper include: (1) Proposes SHG-Tree of n-dimensional space with a hierarchical tree structure. It reflects the region overlapping relationship of hypercube grid units with different granularity. (2) Proposes the linearization methods to present the bounding rectangle of object as a union of variant granularity hypercube grids. (3) Gives operations of SHG-Tree. Experiments result shows the size of SHG-Tree is small enough to remain in main memory even to very large spatial database by applying proper linearization strategy and the queries on SHG-Tree are less than ten milliseconds to ensure the real-time of query.