Storing and querying AIS data in HBase

With the wide application of Automatic Identification System (AIS) on ships, a large amount of data is generated, namely AIS data. It is of great significance for the development of water transportation to process the data effectively. Traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) have low performance when processing massive data. In this paper, HBase which is a representative of the cloud storage systems is used to store data. A structure over HBase is proposed in which data is stored into two parts, one is mainly for the trajectory data query and another is for the range query. To increase the query performance, Geohash, a space indexing technique, is used to linearize the data. On the basis of the structure, a trajectory query algorithm and a range query algorithm are developed. Empirical studies on the large AIS data set collected from the Yangtze River Channel show that the designed storage structure is suitable for storing and querying AIS data.