Non-blocking Patricia Tries with Replace Operations

Abstract

This paper presents a non-blocking Patricia trie implementation for an asynchronous shared-memory system using Compare&Swap. The trie implements a linearizable set and supports three update operations: insert adds an element, delete removes an element and replace replaces one element by another. The replace operation is interesting because it changes two different locations of trie atomically. If all update operations modify different parts of the trie, they run completely concurrently. The implementation also supports a wait-free find operation, which only reads shared memory and never changes the data structure. Empirically, we compare our algorithms to some existing set implementations.