Abstract

Consider an ordered, static tree T on t nodes where each node has a label from alphabet set Σ. TreeTmaybeofar bitrary degree and of arbitrary shape. Say, we wish to support basic navigational operations such as find the parent of node u,theith child of u, and any child of u with label α. In a seminal work over fifteen years ago, Jacobson [15] observed that pointer-based tree representations are wasteful in space and introduced the notion of succinct data structures. He studied the special case of unlabeled trees and presented a succinct data structure of 2t+o(t) bits supporting navigational operations in O(1) time. The space used is asymptotically optimal with the information-theoretic lower bound averaged over all trees. This led to a slew of results on succinct data structures for arrays, trees, strings

Citations