On the Streaming Model Augmented with a Sorting Primitive

The need to deal with massive data sets in many practical applications has led to a growing interest in computational models appropriate for large inputs. The most important quality of a realistic model is that it can be efficiently implemented across a wide range of platforms and operating systems. In this paper, we study the computational model that results if the streaming model is augmented with a sorting primitive. We argue that this model is highly practical, and that a wide range of important problems can be efficiently solved in this (relatively weak) model. Examples are undirected connectivity, minimum spanning trees, and red-blue line segment intersection, among others. This suggests that using more powerful, harder to implement models may not always be justified. Our main technical contribution is to show a hardness result for the "streaming and sorting" model, which demonstrates that the main limitation of this model is that it can only access one data stream at ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: FOCS
• Authors: Gagan Aggarwal, Mayur Datar, Sridhar Rajagopalan, Matthias Ruhl
• Keywords: Computational Model, FOCS 2004, Model, Realistic Model, Theoretical Computer Science