Pipelined van Emde Boas Tree: Algorithms, Analysis, and Applications

Priority queues are essential for various network processing applications, including per-flow queueing with quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees, management of large fast packet buffers, and management of statistics counters. In this paper, we propose a new data structure for implementing high-performance priority queues based on a pipelined version of the van Emde Boas tree. We show that we can achieve O(1) amortized time operations using our architecture, but we can achieve this algorithmic efficiency using only O (log log u) number of pipelined stages, where u is the size of the universe used to represent the priority keys.