Skiplists have become prevalent in systems. The main advantages of skiplists are their simplicity and ease of implementation, and the ability to support operations in the same asymptotic complexities as their tree-based counterparts. In this survey, we explore skiplists and their many variants. We highlight many scenarios of how skiplists are useful and fit well in these usage scenarios. We study several extensions to skiplists to make them fit for more applications, e.g., their use in the multi-dimensional space, network overlaying algorithms, as well as serving as indexes in database systems. Besides, we also discuss systems that adopt the idea of skiplists and apply the probabilistic skip pattern into their designs.

翻译：跳跃表已在各类系统中得到广泛应用。其主要优势在于实现简单、易于部署，且能够支持与其基于树的同类结构渐近复杂度相同的操作。本综述深入探讨了跳跃表及其众多变体。我们重点阐述了跳跃表在多种应用场景中的实用性与适配性，并研究了使其更适用于更多应用的若干扩展，例如在多维空间中的应用、网络覆盖算法中的应用，以及作为数据库系统索引的应用。此外，我们还讨论了采纳跳跃表理念并利用其概率性跳跃模式进行设计的系统。