Improving the performance of multi-dimensional access structures based on k-d-trees

In recent years, various k-d-tree based multidimensional access structures have been proposed. All these structures share an average bucket utilization of at most ln 2/spl ap/69.3%. We present two algorithms which perform local redistributions of objects to improve the storage utilization of these access structures. We show that under fair conditions a good improvement algorithm can save up to 20% of space and up to 15% of query processing time. On the other hand we also show that a local redistribution scheme designed without care, can improve the storage utilization and at the same time worsen the performance of range queries drastically. Furthermore we show the dependencies between split strategies and local redistribution schemes and the general limitations which can be derived from these dependencies.