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：跳跃列表已在众多系统中广泛应用。其主要优势在于结构简单、易于实现，且能够提供与基于树的数据结构相同的渐进复杂度操作支持。本综述系统探究了跳跃列表及其多种变体，详细阐述了跳跃列表在不同应用场景中的实用性与适配性。我们研究了跳跃列表的多种扩展机制，使其适用于更多应用领域，例如多维空间应用、网络覆盖算法以及数据库系统索引构建。此外，本文还探讨了那些借鉴跳跃列表设计理念，将概率性跳跃模式融入系统架构的典型系统。