A Simple Optimistic Skiplist Algorithm

Maurice Herlihy, Yossi Lev, Victor Luchangco, Nir Shavit

Abstract: Because of their highly distributed nature and the lack of global rebalancing, skiplists are becoming an increasingly important logarithmic search structure for concurrent applications. Unfortunately, none of the concurrent skiplist implementations in the literature, whether lock-based or lock-free, have been proven correct. Moreover, the complex structure of these algorithms, most likely the reason for a lack of a proof, is a barrier to software designers that wish to extend and modify the algorithms or base new structures on them.