Improving the Red-Black tree delete algorithm

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 proposed algorithm is very promising since it colors differently the tree while reducing color changes by a factor of about 29%. Moreover, the maintenance operations re-establishing Red-Black tree balance properties are reduced by a factor of about 11%. As a consequence, the proposed algorithm saves about 4% on running time when insert and delete operations are used together while conserving search performance of the standard algorithm.