Abstract
We study the limiting distribution of the height in a generalized trie in which external nodes are capable to store up to b items (the so called b-tries). We assume that such a tree is build from n random strings (items) generated by an unbiased memoryless source. In this paper, we discuss the case when b and n are both large. We shall identify six natural regions of the height distribution that should be compared to three regions obtained for fixed b. We prove that for most n, the limiting distribution is concentrated at the single point k1 = [log2 (n/b)] + 1 as n,b approach infinity. We observe that this is quite different than the height distribution for fixed b, in which case the limiting distribution is of an extreme value type concentrated arount (1 + 1/b)log2 n. We derive our results by analytic methods, namely generating functions and the saddle point method. We also present some numerical verification of our results.
