Improving the Red-Black tree delete algorithm

Abstract

Abstract Today, Red-Black trees are becoming a popular data structure typically used to implement dictionaries, associative arrays, symbol tables within some compilers (C++, Java …) and many other systems. In this paper, we present an improvement of the delete algorithm of this kind of binary search tree. The suggested algorithm appears to be promising as it gives the tree a different coloring while reducing the number of color changes and maintenance operations by a factor of roughly 29% and 11%, respectively. The new coloring favors the presence of red nodes and therefore speeds up the deletion operation. It also saves about 4 % on running time when insert and delete operations are used together while conserving search performance of the standard algorithm.