Supporting spatial data query in peer-to-peer systems

Concerning the high overlap of the bounding boxes in the directory of index information about spatial data, a method called Peer X-tree based on X-tree for spatial queries in peer- to-peer systems was proposed. A hierarchical architecture is designed which could be adjusted according to the state of nodes, so Peer X-tree can exploits the resource heterogeneity that inherent in existing peer-to-peer systems. Here the conception of better nodes and good nodes was introduced, which keep the directory of index information as hierarchical as possible. Both the theoretic analysis and simulation experiments show that the method will greatly improve the performance of spatial data query in peer-to-peer systems.