Patent ID: 7146371

Claim:
A method of initializing a data structure comprising a tree structure that employs a single hash table and a plurality of tree fragments, comprising: creating the single hash table; creating the plurality of tree fragments comprising a plurality of decision nodes and a plurality of leaf nodes of the tree structure, wherein each of the plurality of tree fragments is substantially the same size and comprises a header; storing the plurality of tree fragments such that: the plurality of decision nodes are stored in a contiguous block of memory in a relative position based on the position of the decision node in the tree structure, including blank positions; wherein storing the tree fragment is a function of a local storage size, wherein the local storage size is selected from the group consisting of a memory burst access size, a bus transfer size and a cache line size; and the plurality of leaf nodes are stored in a contiguous block of memory based on the position of the leaf node in the tree structure, concatenating leaf nodes to eliminate blank positions; hashing at least one table entry corresponding to each tree fragment, thereby creating at least one hash key and at least one hash table entry; and assigning the tree fragment to at least one hash table entry.