In conventional approaches such as a functinal approach or a parametric approach to online signature verification, which could not deal with the local shape of signature, much various important informations inherent in the local part of signature shape have been overlooked. In this paper, we try a structural approach in which a signature is represented as a structural form of handwriting primitives and the local parts along a signature handwriting can be selectively compared according to their discrimination power in the process of signature verification, As a result, the error rate is diminished in the case that the weights of subpattern units is applied into comparing process, which is the degree of discrimination power of local part. And also, the global variation and complexity of each signature extracted from the analysis of local shape is found useful in determining the decision threshold more precisely.