Analysis of windowing operations on R+ trees

R-trees and their variants such as R⁺-trees, R*-trees and R^link-trees have been found to be very useful both in theory, and in practice for handling large amounts of object oriented spatial data. The first formal performance analysis of region queries on the extended R⁺-tree structures is presented. The following analytical results are obtained: for a sufficiently large domain, a cost of less than one disk access per qualifying object is always achievable for region queries on an R⁺-tree; the average cost of region query decreases as the total number of the objects retrieved by the operation, increases. The results of this work demonstrate that R⁺ -trees lend themselves conveniently to region queries