We present two results for path traversal in trees, where the traversal is performed in an asymptotically optimal number of I/Os and the tree structure is represented succinctly. Our first result is for bottom-up traversal that starts with a node in the tree T and traverses a path to the root. For blocks of size B, a tree on N nodes, and for a path of length K, we design data structures that permit traversal of the bottom-up path in O(K/B) I/Os using only bits, for an arbitrarily selected constant, ε, where 0∈<∈ε<∈1. Our second result is for top-down traversal in binary trees. We store T using (3∈+∈q)N∈+∈o(N) bits, where q is the number of bits required to store a key, while top-down traversal can still be performed in an asymptotically optimal number of I/Os.
We present a succinct representation of a set of n points on an n×n grid using bits to support orthogonal range counting in time, and range reporting in time, where k is the size of the output. This achieves an improvement on query time by a factor of upon the previous result of Mäkinen and Navarro [1], while using essentially the information-theoretic minimum space. Our data structure not only can be used as a key component in solutions to the general orthogonal range search problem to save storage cost, but also has applications in text indexing. In particular, we apply it to improve two previous space-efficient text indexes that support substring search [2] and position-restricted substring search [1]. We also use it to extend previous results on succinct representations of sequences of small integers, and to design succinct data structures supporting certain types of orthogonal range query in the plane.