Optimal Trade-Off for Succinct String Indexes

Abstract: Let s be a string whose symbols are solely available through access(i), a read-only operation that probes s and returns the symbol at position i in s. Many compressed data structures for strings, trees, and graphs, require two kinds of queries on s: select(c, j), returning the position in s containing the jth occurrence of c, and rank(c, p), counting how many occurrences of c are found in the first p positions of s. We give matching upper and lower bounds for this problem, improving the lower bounds given by Golynski [Theor. Comput. Sci. 387 (2007)] [PhD thesis] and the upper bounds of Barbay et al. [SODA 2007]. We also present new results in another model, improving on Barbay et al. [SODA 2007] and matching a lower bound of Golynski [SODA 2009]. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a general technique for proving lower bounds on succinct data structures, that is based on the access patterns of the supported operations, abstracting from the particular operations at hand. For this, it may find application to other interesting problems on succinct data structures.