Description and analysis of an efficient priority queue representation

Abstract

We present a new data-structure for representing priority queues, the pagoda. A detailed analysis shows that the pagoda provides a very efficient implementation of priority queues, where our measure of efficiency is the average run time of the various algorithms. It handles an arbitrary sequence of n primitive operations chosen from MIN, INSERT, UNION, EXTRACT and EXTRACTMIN in time o(n log n). The constant factors affecting these asymptotic run time are small enough to make the pagoda competitive with any other priority queue, including structures which cannot handle UNION or EXTRACT. The given algorithms process an arbitrary sequence of n operations MIN, INSERT and EXTRACT in linear average time O(n), and a sequence of n INSERT in linear worst case time O(n).