Succinct Encodings of Binary Trees with Application to AVL Trees

Abstract

We use a novel decomposition to create succinct data structures -- supporting a wide range of operations on static trees in constant time -- for a variety tree classes, extending results of Munro, Nicholson, Benkner, and Wild. Motivated by the class of AVL trees, we further derive asymptotics for the information-theoretic lower bound on the number of bits needed to store tree classes whose generating functions satisfy certain functional equations. In particular, we prove that AVL trees require approximately $0.938$ bits per node to encode.

Updated before journal publication; accepted to Theoretical Computer Science