Improving efficacy of concurrent internal binary search trees using local recovery

Abstract

Binary Search Tree (BST) is an important data structure for managing ordered data. Many algorithms have been proposed for concurrent manipulation of a binary search tree in an asynchronous shared memory system that supports search, insert and delete operations based on both external and internal representations of a search tree. An important step in executing an operation on a tree is to traverse the tree from top-to-down in order to locate the operation's window. A process may need to perform this traversal several times to handle failures occurring due to other processes performing concurrent updates on the tree. Most concurrent algorithms that have been proposed so far use a naïve approach and simply restart the traversal from the root of the tree. In this work, we present a new approach to recover from such failures more efficiently for certain types of concurrent binary search tree algorithms using local recovery by restarting the traversal from the "middle" of the tree in order to locate an operation's window (tree section of interest). Our approach is sufficiently general in the sense that it can be applied to most of the existing concurrent binary search trees using internal representation based on both blocking as well as non-blocking approaches. Using experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that our local recovery approach can significantly improve the performance of a concurrent internal BST by up to 124.7% when the contention is high.