On Digital Search Trees - A Simple Method for Constructing Balanced Binary Trees

This paper presents digital search trees, a binary tree data structure that can produce well-balanced trees in the majority of cases. Digital search tree algorithms are reviewed, and a novel algorithm for building sorted trees is introduced. It was found that digital search trees are simple to implement because their code is similar to the code for ordinary binary search trees. Experimental evaluation was performed and the results are presented. It was found that digital search trees, in addition to being conceptually simpler, often outperform other popular balanced trees such as AVL or red-black trees. It was found that good performance of digital search trees is due to better exploitation of cache locality in modern computers.