Efficient spatial data partitioning for distributed kNN joins

Parallel processing of large spatial datasets over distributed systems has become a core part of modern data analytic systems like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. The general-purpose design of these systems does not natively account for the data’s spatial attributes and results in poor scalability, accuracy, or prolonged runtimes. Spatial extensions remedy the problem and introduce spatial data recognition and operations. At the core of a spatial extension, a locality-preserving spatial partitioner determines how to spatially group the dataset’s objects into smaller chunks using the distributed system’s available resources. Existing spatial extensions rely on data sampling and often mismanage non-spatial data by either overlooking their memory requirements or excluding them entirely. This work discusses the various challenges that face spatial data partitioning and proposes a novel spatial partitioner for effectively processing spatial queries over large spatial datasets. For evaluation, the proposed partitioner is integrated with the well-known k -Nearest Neighbor ( k NN) spatial join query. Several experiments evaluate the proposal using real-world datasets. Our approach differs from existing proposals by (1) accounting for the dataset’s unique spatial traits without sampling, (2) considering the computational overhead required to handle non-spatial data, (3) minimizing partition shuffles, (4) computing the optimal utilization of the available resources, and (5) achieving accurate results. This contributes to the problem of spatial data partitioning through (1) providing a comprehensive discussion of the problems facing spatial data partitioning and processing, (2) the development of a novel spatial partitioning technique for in-memory distributed processing, (3) an effective, built-in, load-balancing methodology that reduces spatial query skews, and (4) a Spark-based implementation of the proposed work with an accurate k NN spatial join query. Experimental tests show up to 1.48 times improvement in runtime as well as the accuracy of results.