Constructing Light Spanners Deterministically in Near-Linear Time

Graph spanners are well-studied and widely used both in theory and practice. In a recent breakthrough, Chechik and Wulff-Nilsen [Shiri Chechik and Christian Wulff-Nilsen, 2018] improved the state-of-the-art for light spanners by constructing a (2k-1)(1+epsilon)-spanner with O(n^(1+1/k)) edges and O_epsilon(n^(1/k)) lightness. Soon after, Filtser and Solomon [Arnold Filtser and Shay Solomon, 2016] showed that the classic greedy spanner construction achieves the same bounds. The major drawback of the greedy spanner is its running time of O(mn^(1+1/k)) (which is faster than [Shiri Chechik and Christian Wulff-Nilsen, 2018]). This makes the construction impractical even for graphs of moderate size. Much faster spanner constructions do exist but they only achieve lightness Omega_epsilon(kn^(1/k)), even when randomization is used. The contribution of this paper is deterministic spanner constructions that are fast, and achieve similar bounds as the state-of-the-art slower constructions. Our first result is an O_epsilon(n^(2+1/k+epsilon\u27)) time spanner construction which achieves the state-of-the-art bounds. Our second result is an O_epsilon(m + n log n) time construction of a spanner with (2k-1)(1+epsilon) stretch, O(log k * n^(1+1/k) edges and O_epsilon(log k * n^(1/k)) lightness. This is an exponential improvement in the dependence on k compared to the previous result with such running time. Finally, for the important special case where k=log n, for every constant epsilon>0, we provide an O(m+n^(1+epsilon)) time construction that produces an O(log n)-spanner with O(n) edges and O(1) lightness which is asymptotically optimal. This is the first known sub-quadratic construction of such a spanner for any k = omega(1). To achieve our constructions, we show a novel deterministic incremental approximate distance oracle. Our new oracle is crucial in our construction, as known randomized dynamic oracles require the assumption of a non-adaptive adversary. This is a strong assumption, which has seen recent attention in prolific venues. Our new oracle allows the order of the edge insertions to not be fixed in advance, which is critical as our spanner algorithm chooses which edges to insert based on the answers to distance queries. We believe our new oracle is of independent interest

Bounded Degree Spanners of the Hypercube

In this short note we study two questions about the existence of subgraphs of the hypercube $Q_n$ with certain properties. The first question, due to Erd\H{o}s--Hamburger--Pippert--Weakley, asks whether there exists a bounded degree subgraph of $Q_n$ which has diameter $n$. We answer this question by giving an explicit construction of such a subgraph with maximum degree at most 120. The second problem concerns properties of $k$-additive spanners of the hypercube, that is, subgraphs of $Q_n$ in which the distance between any two vertices is at most $k$ larger than in $Q_n$. Denoting by $\Delta_{k,\infty}(n)$ the minimum possible maximum degree of a $k$-additive spanner of $Q_n$, Arizumi--Hamburger--Kostochka showed that $$\frac{n}{\ln n}e^{-4k}\leq \Delta_{2k,\infty}(n)\leq 20\frac{n}{\ln n}\ln \ln n.$$ We improve their upper bound by showing that $$\Delta_{2k,\infty}(n)\leq 10^{4k} \frac{n}{\ln n}\ln^{(k+1)}n,$$where the last term denotes a $k+1$-fold iterated logarithm.Comment: 10 page

An FPT Algorithm for Minimum Additive Spanner Problem

For a positive integer t and a graph G, an additive t-spanner of G is a spanning subgraph in which the distance between every pair of vertices is at most the original distance plus t. The Minimum Additive t-Spanner Problem is to find an additive t-spanner with the minimum number of edges in a given graph, which is known to be NP-hard. Since we need to care about global properties of graphs when we deal with additive t-spanners, the Minimum Additive t-Spanner Problem is hard to handle and hence only few results are known for it. In this paper, we study the Minimum Additive t-Spanner Problem from the viewpoint of parameterized complexity. We formulate a parameterized version of the problem in which the number of removed edges is regarded as a parameter, and give a fixed-parameter algorithm for it. We also extend our result to the case with both a multiplicative approximation factor ? and an additive approximation parameter ?, which we call (?, ?)-spanners