Heap Traversal and Its Applications

Abstract

The heap is a very fundamental data structure used in many computer software applications as well as in operating systems. In this paper, we propose a heap traversal algorithm which visits the nodes of a binary heap in ascending order of the key values stored in the nodes. We demonstrate two implementations of the heap traversal algorithm, using a binary search tree or a binary heap as the auxiliary structure that facilitates the traversal process. We also report the experimental results comparing the efficiency of heap-traversal based sorting algorithms vs. other well-known sorting algorithms. Our experimental results show that heap traversal can be applied to many traditional applications with improved performance.