Free Split: A Write-Ahead Protocol to Improve Latency in Distributed Prefix Tree Indexing Structures

Distributed Prefix Tree indexing structures on top of peer-to-peer overlays provide a scalable solution to support range queries and proximity queries for Big Data applications. However, the latency of current maintenance protocols impacts very negatively on main operations like data insertions. This paper presents a new maintenance protocol that anticipates every data insertion on provisional child nodes. A performance evaluation conducted on the Prefix Hash Tree and Free Split shows that Free Split significantly reduces maintenance overheads, and therefore improves query response time.