Distributed Construction of Lightweight Spanners for Unit Ball Graphs

Resolving an open question from 2006 [Damian et al., 2006], we prove the existence of light-weight bounded-degree spanners for unit ball graphs in the metrics of bounded doubling dimension, and we design a simple ?(log^*n)-round distributed algorithm in the LOCAL model of computation, that given a unit ball graph G with n vertices and a positive constant ? < 1 finds a (1+?)-spanner with constant bounds on its maximum degree and its lightness using only 2-hop neighborhood information. This immediately improves the best prior lightness bound, the algorithm of Damian, Pandit, and Pemmaraju [Damian et al., 2006], which runs in ?(log^*n) rounds in the LOCAL model, but has a ?(log ?) bound on its lightness, where ? is the ratio of the length of the longest edge to the length of the shortest edge in the unit ball graph. Next, we adjust our algorithm to work in the CONGEST model, without changing its round complexity, hence proposing the first spanner construction for unit ball graphs in the CONGEST model of computation. We further study the problem in the two dimensional Euclidean plane and we provide a construction with similar properties that has a constant average number of edge intersections per node. Lastly, we provide experimental results that confirm our theoretical bounds, and show an efficient performance from our distributed algorithm compared to the best known centralized construction

Hierarchical Routing over Dynamic Wireless Networks

Wireless network topologies change over time and maintaining routes requires frequent updates. Updates are costly in terms of consuming throughput available for data transmission, which is precious in wireless networks. In this paper, we ask whether there exist low-overhead schemes that produce low-stretch routes. This is studied by using the underlying geometric properties of the connectivity graph in wireless networks.Comment: 29 pages, 19 figures, a shorter version was published in the proceedings of the 2008 ACM Sigmetrics conferenc

Computing the Greedy Spanner in Linear Space

The greedy spanner is a high-quality spanner: its total weight, edge count and maximal degree are asymptotically optimal and in practice significantly better than for any other spanner with reasonable construction time. Unfortunately, all known algorithms that compute the greedy spanner of n points use Omega(n^2) space, which is impractical on large instances. To the best of our knowledge, the largest instance for which the greedy spanner was computed so far has about 13,000 vertices. We present a O(n)-space algorithm that computes the same spanner for points in R^d running in O(n^2 log^2 n) time for any fixed stretch factor and dimension. We discuss and evaluate a number of optimizations to its running time, which allowed us to compute the greedy spanner on a graph with a million vertices. To our knowledge, this is also the first algorithm for the greedy spanner with a near-quadratic running time guarantee that has actually been implemented