An efficient B-tree layer for flash-memory storage systems

With a significant growth of the markets for consumer electronics and various embedded systems, flash memory is now an economic solution for storage systems design. For index structures which require intensively fine-grained updates/modifications, block-oriented access over flash memory could introduce a significant number of redundant writes. It might not only severely degrade the overall performance but also damage the reliability of flash memory. In this paper, we propose a very different approach which could efficiently handle fine-grained updates/modifications caused by B-Tree index access over flash memory. The implementation is done directly over the flash translation layer (FTL) such that no modifications to existing application systems are needed. We demonstrate that the proposed methodology could significantly improve the system performance and, at the same time, reduce the overheads of flash-memory management and the energy dissipation, when index structures are adopted over flash memory.