GeoTrie: A scalable architecture for location-temporal range queries over massive geotagged data sets

The proliferation of GPS-enabled devices leads to the massive generation of geotagged data sets recently known as Big Location Data. It allows users to explore and analyse data in space and time, and requires an architecture that scales with the insertions and location-temporal queries workload from thousands to millions of users. Most large scale key-value data storage solutions only provide a single one-dimensional index which does not natively support efficient multidimensional queries. In this paper, we propose GeoTrie, a scalable architecture built by coalescing any number of machines organized on top of a Distributed Hash Table. The key idea of our approach is to provide a distributed global index which scales with the number of nodes and provides natural load balancing for insertions and location-temporal range queries. We assess our solution using the largest public multimedia data set released by Yahoo! which includes millions of geotagged multimedia files.