An Effective High-Performance Multiway Spatial Join Algorithm with Spark

Multiway spatial join plays an important role in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and their applications. With the increase in spatial data volumes, the performance of multiway spatial join has encountered a computation bottleneck in the context of big data. Parallel or distributed computing platforms, such as MapReduce and Spark, are promising for resolving the intensive computing issue. Previous approaches have focused on developing single-threaded join algorithms as an optimizing and partition strategy for parallel computing. In this paper, we present an effective high-performance multiway spatial join algorithm with Spark (MSJS) to overcome the multiway spatial join bottleneck. MSJS handles the problem through cascaded pairwise join. Using the power of Spark, the formerly inefficient cascaded pairwise spatial join is transformed into a high-performance approach. Experiments using massive real-world data sets prove that MSJS outperforms existing parallel approaches of multiway spatial join that have been described in the literature.