Sliding suffix trees revisited

The sliding suffix tree (Fiala \& Greene, 1989) is a suffix tree that is maintained for a sliding window $W_i = T[i..i+d-1]$ of size $d$ that shifts over an input text $T$ of length $n$ from left to right, for increasing $i = 1, \ldots, n-d+1$. It is known that the sliding suffix tree can be maintained in $O(n \log σ)$ time with $O(d)$ space, where $σ$ is the alphabet size. Updating the sliding suffix tree from $W_i = T[i..i+d-1]$ to $W_{i+1} = T[i+1..i+d]$ requires the following three major tasks: (1) Delete the leaf that represents the longest suffix $W_i$, (2) Insert new leaves that represent the suffixes of $W_{i+1}$ that appear exactly once in $W_{i+1}$, and (3) After the leaf deletion due to Task (1) and each leaf insertion due to Task (2), maintain the label $\langle \ell, r \rangle$ of every edge as a valid pair in the new window $W_{i+1}$, such that $i+1 \leq \ell \leq r \leq i+d$. In this paper, we present the first algorithm that performs Task (3) in $O(1)$ worst-case time per node deletion/insertion, which leads to another alternative to efficient sliding suffix tree construction. This is an improvement over the existing algorithms by Larsson (1996, 1999) and by Senft (2005) both of which can only perform Task (3) in $O(1)$ amortized time. Our key data structure is a non-trivial extension of leaf pointers, which were originally proposed by Brodnik and Jekovec (2018) for pattern matching with sliding suffix trees.