A GPU-Accelerated Framework for Processing Trajectory Queries

Abstract

The increasing amount of trajectory data facilitates a wide spectrum of practical applications. In many such applications, large numbers of trajectory range and similarity queries are issued continuously, which calls for high-throughput trajectory query processing. Traditional in-memory databases lack considerations of the unique features of trajectories, thus suffering from inferior performance. Existing trajectory query processing systems are typically designed for only one type of trajectory queries, i.e., either range or similarity query, but not for both. Inspired by the massive parallelism on GPUs, in this paper, we develop a GPU-accelerated framework, named GAT, to support both types of trajectory queries (i.e., both range and similarity queries) with high throughput. For similarity queries, we adopt the Edit Distance on Real sequence (EDR) as the similarity measure which is accurate and robust to noise in real-world trajectories. GAT employs a GPU-friendly index called GTIDX to effectively filter invalid trajectories for both range and similarity queries, and exploits the GPU to perform parallel verifications. To accelerate the verification process on the GPU, we apply the Morton-based encoding method to reorganize trajectory points and facilitate coalesced data accesses for individual point data in global memory, which reduces the global memory bandwidth requirement significantly. We also propose a technique of grouping size-varying cells into balanced blocks with similar numbers of trajectory points, to achieve load balancing among the Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) of the GPU. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of GAT using two real-life trajectory datasets. The results show that GAT is scalable and achieves high throughput with acceptable indexing cost.