Linear-Time Construction of Suffix Arrays

The time complexity of suffix tree construction has been shown to be equivalent to that of sorting: O(n) for a constant-size alphabet or an integer alphabet and O(n logn) for a general alphabet. However, previous algorithms for constructing suffix arrays have the time complexity of O(n logn) even for a constant-size alphabet. In this paper we present a linear-time algorithm to construct suffix arrays for integer alphabets, which do not use suffix trees as intermediate data structures during its construction. Since the case of a constant-size alphabet can be subsumed in that of an integer alphabet, our result implies that the time complexity of directly constructing suffix arrays matches that of constructing suffix trees.