On the power of bfs to determine a graph’s diameter

Abstract. Recently considerable effort has been spent on showing that Lexicographic Breadth First Search (LBFS) can be used to determine a tight bound on the diameter of graphs from various restricted classes. In this paper, we show that in some cases, the full power of LBFS is not required and that other variations of Breadth First Search (BFS) suffice. The restricted graph classes that are amenable to this approach all have a small constant upper bound on the maximum sized cycle that may appear as an induced subgraph. We show that on graphs that have no induced cycle of size greater than k, BFS finds an estimate of the diameter that is no worse than diam(G) −⌊k/2⌋−2.

Collective tree spanners of graphs

In this paper we introduce a new notion of collective tree spanners. We say that a graph G =(V,E) admits a system of µ collective additive tree r-spanners if there is a system T (G) of at most µ spanning trees of G such that for any two vertices x, y of G a spanning tree T ∈T(G) exists such that dT (x, y) ≤ dG(x, y) +r. Among other results, we show that any chordal graph, chordal bipartite graph or cocomparability graph admits a system of at most log 2 n collective additive tree 2–spanners and any c-chordal graph admits a system of at most log 2 n collective additive tree (2⌊c/2⌋)–spanners. Towards establishing these results, we present a general property for graphs, called (α, r)– decomposition, and show that any (α, r)–decomposable graph G with n vertices admits a system of at most log 1/α n collective additive tree 2r– spanners. We discuss also an application of the collective tree spanners to the problem of designing compact and efficient routing schemes in graphs

Navigating in a graph by aid of its spanning tree

Let G =(V,E) be a graph and T be a spanning tree of G. We consider the following strategy in advancing in G from a vertex x towards a target vertex y: from a current vertex z (initially, z = x), unless z = y, gotoaneighborofz in G that is closest to y in T (breaking ties arbitrarily). In this strategy, each vertex has full knowledge of its neighborhood in G and can use the distances in T to navigate in G. Thus, additionally to standard local information (the neighborhood NG(v)), the only global information that is available to each vertex v is the topology of the spanning tree T (in fact, v can know only a very small piece of information about T and still be able to infer from it the necessary tree-distances). For each source vertex x and target vertex y, this way, a path, called a greedy routing path, is produced. Denote by gG,T (x, y) the length of a longest greedy routing path that can be produced for x and y using this strategy and T. We say that a spanning tree T of a graph G is an additive r-carcass for G if gG,T (x, y) ≤ dG(x, y)+r for each ordered pair x, y ∈ V. In this paper, we investigate the problem, given a graph family F, whether a small integer r exists such that any graph G ∈Fadmits an additive r-carcass. We show that rectilinear p × q grids, hypercubes, distance-hereditary graphs, dually chordal graphs (and, therefore, strongly chordal graphs and interval graphs), all admit additive 0-carcasses. Furthermore, every chordal graph G admits an additive (ω(G) + 1)-carcass (where ω(G) is the size of a maximum clique of G), each 3-sun-free chordal graph admits an additive 2-carcass, each chordal bipartite graph admits an additive 4-carcass. In particular, any k-tree admits an additive (k+2)-carcass. All those carcasses are easy to construct