A Lower Bound Framework for Binary Search Trees with Rotations

This paper considers the problem of bounding below the cost of accessing a sequence of keys in a binary search tree. We develop a lower bound framework for this problem that applies to any binary search tree algorithm, including self-adjusting and offline ones. This new framework can be used to derive two previously known lower bounds. This research was sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF) grant no. CCR-0122581.