Distance-Associated Join Indices for Spatial Range Search

Spatial join indices are join indices constructed for spatial objects. Similar to join indices for relational database systems, spatial join indices improve efficiency of spatial join operations. In this paper, a distanceassociated join index structure is developed to speed up spatial queries especially for spatial range queries. Three distance-associated join indexing mechanisms: basic, ring-structured and hierarchical, are presented and studied. Our analysis and performance study shows that distance-associated spatial join indices substantially improve the performance of spatial queries, and different structures are best suited for different applications.