advanced sorting the first node to the sorted list with the use of dummy node at the front of the listas illustrated in figure the dummy node is only temporary and will not be part of the final sorted list thusafter the two sublists have been mergedthe function returns reference to the second node in the list (the first real node following the dummy node)which becomes the head reference sublista sublistb (anewlist newtail dummy node (bfigure merging two ordered linked lists using dummy node and tail reference the linked list version of the merge sort algorithm is also ( log nfunction but it does not require temporary storage to merge the sublists the analysis of the run time is left as an exercise note dummy nodes dummy node is temporary node that is used to simplify link modifications when adding or removing nodes from linked list they are called dummy nodes because they contain no actual data but they are part of the physical linked structure