3.5-Way Cuckoo Hashing for the Price of 2-and-a-Bit

The study of hashing is closely related to the analysis of balls and bins; items are hashed to memory locations much as balls are thrown into bins. In particular, Azar et. al. [2] considered putting each ball in the less-full of two random bins. This lowers the probability that a bin exceeds a certain load from exponentially small to doubly exponential, giving maximum load log log n + O(1) with high probability. Cuckoo hashing [20] draws on this idea. Each item is hashed to two buckets of capacity k. If both are full, then the insertion procedure moves previously-inserted items to their alternate buckets to make space for the new item. In a natural implementation, the buckets are represented by partitioning a fixed array of memory into non-overlapping blocks of size k. An item is hashed to two such blocks and may be stored at any location within either one. We analyze a simple twist in which each item is hashed to two arbitrary size-k memory blocks. (So consecutive blocks are no longe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ESA
• Authors: Eric Lehman, Rina Panigrahy
• Keywords: Algorithms, Buckets, ESA 2009, Maximum Load Log, Random Bins