A revisited representation of the red-black tree Online publication date: Thu, 09-Dec-2021
by Lynda Bounif; Djamel Eddine Zegour
International Journal of Computer Aided Engineering and Technology (IJCAET), Vol. 16, No. 1, 2022
Abstract: Nowadays, the red-black tree is probably the most used balanced data structure. It searches, inserts and deletes keys in O log (n) time and it is highly recommended for applications with frequent updates. However this balanced binary tree is complicated in the implementation because of the different cases in both the insertion and deletion and the use of the red and black colours. That's why we propose in this paper a simpler representation of this structure. The new representation uses one extra bit in order to gain simplicity and efficiency. The red-black tree is seen as a partitioned binary tree and uses instead of colours three kinds of subtrees: 01, 10 and 11 subtrees. We show on one hand that we can simply express the insert algorithm and on the other hand that the performance of the algorithm is slightly better. Efficiency is due to the fact that the search branch used in the new representation is reduced by half. Therefore this representation can replace easily the standard algorithms of red-black tree in practice.
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Computer Aided Engineering and Technology (IJCAET):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:
Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.
If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com
Our Blog 
Follow us on Twitter 
Visit us on Facebook