QUEUES

1. Explain in detail about queue.

A Queue is a data structure in which insertion of elements is done only in the BACK (rear) end and
deletion of data is done only in the FRONT. So, Queue is First In First Out(FIFO) structure. Two pointers
FRONT and REAR are used to point to the first and last elements of the queue.

Following operations can be performed on a queue.

1. ENQUEUE: Adds
dds an object to the rear of the queue if the queue is not full. Following are the steps of
Enqueue operation.
i. Check
ck whether queue is full. If full, abort by displaying QUEUE OVERFLOW
ii. Increment rear by one
iii. Place the element in the position pointed by rear.
2. DEQUEUE: Removes and returns an element from the front of the queue if it is not empty. Following
are
re the steps of Dequeue operation.
i. Check whether queue is empty
empty. If empty, abort by displaying QUEUE UNDERFLOW
ii. Store the element pointed by front in a temporary variable.
iii. Increment front by one
iv. Return
eturn value stored in temporary variable.
Example. Let a queue Q store the elements 1, 2, and 3, where 1 is at the front of the queue. This is
shown in following Figure, Steps 11-3,
3, below. If Q has finite capacity, then we can detect that Q is full.
Dequeueing of the values 1, 2, and 3 is shown in Figure 2.4.3, Steps 4-6,
6, which yields an empty queue.
Note how the values that were first enqueued come out the front of the queue first. That is why a queue
implements a FIFO buffer.

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2. What is the disadvantage of simple queue? How to address it?

In array implementation of simple queue, new elements are always inserted from the rear and if the last
location of queue(rear) holds an element, even though the space is available at the beginning of queue,
no elements will be inserted. The queue will be treated as overflow. One way to handle this problem is
to fill the empty locations, at the beginning of the queue due to delete operations, by shifting the
following elements to beginning of the queue. Thus, the space will be available at the rear end and new
elements can be inserted at the end. This approach requires that the entire queue be moved up one
position in the array every time an element is deleted from queue, which makes DEQUEUE operation
expensive. The best solution to this problem is to use ci
circular queue.
For example consider the following queue with size 3.
After invoking ENQUEUE(6), ENQUEUE(9), ENQUEUE(3), the resulting queue is as shown below.

After invoking DEQUEUE( ), queue is

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After invoking DEQUEUE( ) second time, queue is

At this stage queue whose capacity is 3 has only one element in it having room for 2 more elements.
But, insertion of new element is not possible since rear is already pointing to the last position in the
array.
3. Explain circular queue concept.
Circular
ar queues are particular implementations of queues. It is a data structure that uses a single, fixedfixed
size array as if it were connected end
end-to-end. This structure lends itself easily to store data elements.
elements

Following operations can be performed on a circular queue.

ENQUEUE
i. Check whether queue is full. If full, abort by displaying QUEUE OVERFLOW
ii. Increment rear by one.
iii. if rear is greater than or equal to MAXIMUM SIZE of the queue set it to 0.
iv. Place thee element in the position pointed by rear.
DEQUEUE

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i. Check whether queue is empty. If empty, abort by displaying QUEUE UNDERFLOW

ii. Store the element pointed by front in a temporary variable.
iii. Increment front by one
iv. If front is greater than or equal to MAXIMUM SIZE of the queue set it to 0.
iv. return value stored in temporary variable.
Following figure shows ENQUEUE and DEQUEUE operation by means of an example.

4. Mention the applications of queues

Simple queues are used for implementing
Round Robin scheduling technique

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Page replacement algorithm

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