A fast selective traversal algorithm for binary search trees

The process of visiting a mini mal number of nodes to retrieve data satisfying the range condition from a binary search tree is called "selective traversal". Driscall and Lien gave an algorithm SELECT for selective traversal which used a MARKER field of 3 bits for each node in the tree. In this paper we present a new algorithm, called INPROC, which uses a MARKER field of 2 bits and runs faster than algorithm SELECT.