2 research outputs found
The Norms of Graph Spanners
A -spanner of a graph is a subgraph in which all distances are
preserved up to a multiplicative factor. A classical result of Alth\"ofer
et al. is that for every integer and every graph , there is a
-spanner of with at most edges. But for some
settings the more interesting notion is not the number of edges, but the
degrees of the nodes. This spurred interest in and study of spanners with small
maximum degree. However, this is not necessarily a robust enough objective: we
would like spanners that not only have small maximum degree, but also have
"few" nodes of "large" degree. To interpolate between these two extremes, in
this paper we initiate the study of graph spanners with respect to the
-norm of their degree vector, thus simultaneously modeling the number
of edges (the -norm) and the maximum degree (the -norm).
We give precise upper bounds for all ranges of and stretch : we prove
that the greedy -spanner has norm of at most , and that this bound is tight (assuming the Erd\H{o}s girth
conjecture). We also study universal lower bounds, allowing us to give
"generic" guarantees on the approximation ratio of the greedy algorithm which
generalize and interpolate between the known approximations for the
and norm. Finally, we show that at least in some situations,
the norm behaves fundamentally differently from or
: there are regimes ( and stretch in particular) where
the greedy spanner has a provably superior approximation to the generic
guarantee