Performance evaluation of signature-based access mechanisms for efficient information retrieval

With rapid increase of information requirements from various application areas, there has been much research on the efficient information retrieval. A signature is an abstraction of information, and has been applied in many proposals of information retrieval systems. In this paper we evaluate the performance of various signature-based information retrieval methods and provide guidelines for the most effective usage to a given operational environment. We derive analytic performance evaluation models of these access methods based on retrieval time, storage overhead and insertion time. The relationships between various performance parameters are thoroughly investigated. We also perform simulation experiments by using wide range of parameter values and show that the performance experiments agree with those analytic models.