A concurrent k-NN search algorithm for R-tree

Abstract

k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) search is one of the commonly used query in database systems. It has its application in various domains like data mining, decision support systems, information retrieval, multimedia and spatial databases, etc. When k-NN search is performed over large data sets, spatial data indexing structures such as R-trees are commonly used to improve query efficiency. The best-first k-NN (BF-kNN) algorithm is the fastest known k-NN over R-trees. We present CBF-kNN, a concurrent BF-kNN for R-trees, which is the first concurrent version of k-NN we know of for R-trees. CBF-kNN uses one of the most efficient concurrent priority queues known as mound. CBF-kNN overcomes the concurrency limitations of priority queues by using a tree-parallel mode of execution. CBF-kNN has an estimated speedup of O(p/k) for p threads. Experimental results on various real datasets show that the speedup in practice is close to this estimate.