Leftmost Child Right Sibling

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Leftmost Child Right Sibling

• Irena Pevac
• CS501

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General Tree
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Leftmost Child Right Sibling Representation of
Trees

• To overcome the space inefficiency of the array
  of references representation of a tree with large
  branching factor (such as the one used in trie)
  we can use linked list to represent the children
  of nodes. That way we reduce significant number
  of null references.
• Each node has reference to its leftmost child and
  right sibling only.
• Each leaf has a null for leftmost child and each
  rightmost child has a null for right sibling
  reference.

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Leftmost-child-right-sibling representation of a
tree
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Trie and Leftmost-Child-Right-Sibling
Representations

• Trie requires O(1) access time to reach any
  child. Requires more space due to many null
  references.
• Leftmost-child-right-sibling representation of a
  tree uses less space.
• Leftmost-child-right-sibling representation of a
  tree does not limit the branching factor of
  nodes, while in case of trie represented using an
  array for references branching factor is limited.