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.