Power of d Choices with Simple Tabulation

We consider the classic d-choice paradigm of Azar et al. [STOC'94] in which m balls are put into n bins sequentially as follows: For each ball we are given a choice of d bins chosen according to d hash functions and the ball is placed in the least loaded of these bins, breaking ties arbitrarily. The interest is in the number of balls in the fullest bin after all balls have been placed. In this paper we suppose that the d hash functions are simple tabulation hash functions which are easy to implement and can be evaluated in constant time. Generalising a result by Dahlgaard et al. [SODA'16] we show that for an arbitrary constant d >= 2 the expected maximum load is at most (lg lg n)/(lg d) + O(1). We further show that by using a simple tie-breaking algorithm introduced by Vöcking [J.ACM'03] the expected maximum load is reduced to (lg lg n)/(d lg phi_d) + O(1) where phi_d is the rate of growth of the d-ary Fibonacci numbers. Both of these expected bounds match those known from the fully random setting. The analysis by Dahlgaard et al. relies on a proof by Patrascu and Thorup [J.ACM'11] concerning the use of simple tabulation for cuckoo hashing. We require a generalisation to d>2 hash functions, but the original proof is an 8-page tour de force of ad-hoc arguments that do not appear to generalise. Our main technical contribution is a shorter, simpler and more accessible proof of the result by Patrascu and Thorup, where the relevant parts generalise nicely to the analysis of d choices.