Distributional analysis of Robin Hood linear probing hashing with buckets

Abstract

This paper presents the first distributional analysis of a linear probing hashing scheme with buckets of size $b$. The exact distribution of the cost of successful searches for a $b \alpha$ -full table is obtained, and moments and asymptotic results are derived. With the use of the Poisson transform distributional results are also obtained for tables of size $m$ and $n$ elements. A key element in the analysis is the use of a new family of numbers that satisfies a recurrence resembling that of the Bernoulli numbers. These numbers may prove helpful in studying recurrences involving truncated generating functions, as well as in other problems related with buckets.

Keywords

• distributional analysis
• hashing
• linear probing
• buckets
• [info.info-ds] computer science [cs]/data structures and algorithms [cs.ds]
• [info.info-dm] computer science [cs]/discrete mathematics [cs.dm]
• [math.math-co] mathematics [math]/combinatorics [math.co]
• [info.info-cg] computer science [cs]/computational geometry [cs.cg]