A New Flash TPR-tree for Indexing Moving Objects with Frequent Updates

A TPR-tree is a well-known indexing structure that is developed to answer queries about the current or future time locations of moving objects. For the purpose of space efficiency, the TPR-tree employs the notion of VBR (velocity bounding rectangle)so that a regionalrectangle presents varying positions of a group of moving objects. Since the rectangle computed from a VBR always encloses the possible maximum range of an indexed object group, a search process only has to follow VBR-based rectangles overlapped with a given query range, while searching toward candidate leaf nodes. Although the TPR-tree index shows up its space efficiency, it easily suffers from the problem of dead space that results from fast and constant expansions of VBR-based rectangles. Against this, the TPR-tree index is enforced to update leaf nodes for reducing dead spaces within them. Such an update-prone feature of the TPR-tree becomes more problematic when the tree is saved in flash storage. This is because flash storage has very expensive update costs. To solve this problem, we propose a new Bloom filter based caching scheme that is useful for reducing updates in a flash TPR-tree. Since the proposed scheme can efficiently control the frequency of updates on a leaf node, it can offer good performance for indexing moving objects in modern flash storage.