Improved Purely Additive Fault-Tolerant Spanners

Let $G$ be an unweighted $n$-node undirected graph. A \emph{$\beta$-additive spanner} of $G$ is a spanning subgraph $H$ of $G$ such that distances in $H$ are stretched at most by an additive term $\beta$ w.r.t. the corresponding distances in $G$. A natural research goal related with spanners is that of designing \emph{sparse} spanners with \emph{low} stretch. In this paper, we focus on \emph{fault-tolerant} additive spanners, namely additive spanners which are able to preserve their additive stretch even when one edge fails. We are able to improve all known such spanners, in terms of either sparsity or stretch. In particular, we consider the sparsest known spanners with stretch $6$, $28$, and $38$, and reduce the stretch to $4$, $10$, and $14$, respectively (while keeping the same sparsity). Our results are based on two different constructions. On one hand, we show how to augment (by adding a \emph{small} number of edges) a fault-tolerant additive \emph{sourcewise spanner} (that approximately preserves distances only from a given set of source nodes) into one such spanner that preserves all pairwise distances. On the other hand, we show how to augment some known fault-tolerant additive spanners, based on clustering techniques. This way we decrease the additive stretch without any asymptotic increase in their size. We also obtain improved fault-tolerant additive spanners for the case of one vertex failure, and for the case of $f$ edge failures.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, ESA 201

New Pairwise Spanners

Let G = (V,E) be an undirected unweighted graph on n vertices. A subgraph H of G is called an (all-pairs) purely additive spanner with stretch beta if for every (u,v) in V times V, mathsf{dist}_H(u,v) le mathsf{dist}_G(u,v) + beta. The problem of computing sparse spanners with small stretch beta is well-studied. Here we consider the following relaxation: we are given psubseteq V times V and we seek a sparse subgraph H where mathsf{dist}_H(u,v)le mathsf{dist}_G(u,v) + beta for each (u,v) in p. Such a subgraph is called a pairwise spanner with additive stretch beta and our goal is to construct such subgraphs that are sparser than all-pairs spanners with the same stretch. We show sparse pairwise spanners with additive stretch 4 and with additive stretch 6. We also consider the following special cases: p = S times V and p = S times T, where Ssubseteq V and Tsubseteq V, and show sparser pairwise spanners for these cases