A Lower Bound for Succinct Rank Queries

Abstract: The rank problem in succinct data structures asks to preprocess an array A[1..n] of bits into a data structure using as close to n bits as possible, and answer queries of the form rank(k) = Sum_{i=1}^k A[i]. The problem has been intensely studied, and features as a subroutine in a majority of succinct data structures. We show that in the cell probe model with w-bit cells, if rank takes t time, the space of the data structure must be at least n + n/w^{O(t)} bits. This redundancy/query trade-off is essentially optimal, matching our upper bound from [FOCS'08].