COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PRIORITY QUEUE IMPLEMENTATIONS

Computer Science

In this paper, we analyze and compare various available ways to implement priority queues. A Priority queue is an abstract data type which is like a regular queue, but where additionally each element has a priority key associated to it. The key serves as a way of sorting out the elements of the priority queue. One can imagine a case of vehicles running on the road. Certain vehicles like ambulances need more priority than any other. VIP vehicles come second and so on. Here, this signifies the relevance of priority. Similarly in operating systems jobs may be scheduled as per their importance this can be achieved through priority queues. The primary focus of this paper is to analyze various available ways of implementing priority queues, which could later form as basis when devising a new approach or method to improve the efficiency of priority queues. We compare the priority queues on the basis of their running time efficiencies and compare their running time bounds in the worst cases. This paper also forms the basis for our next work, where we show, how the concept of memory pooling can be effectively used in improving the efficiency of the priority queues.

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