The Price of Order

We present tight bounds on the spanning ratio of a large family of ordered $\theta$-graphs. A $\theta$-graph partitions the plane around each vertex into $m$ disjoint cones, each having aperture $\theta = 2 \pi/m$. An ordered $\theta$-graph is constructed by inserting the vertices one by one and connecting each vertex to the closest previously-inserted vertex in each cone. We show that for any integer $k \geq 1$, ordered $\theta$-graphs with $4k + 4$ cones have a tight spanning ratio of $1 + 2 \sin(\theta/2) / (\cos(\theta/2) - \sin(\theta/2))$. We also show that for any integer $k \geq 2$, ordered $\theta$-graphs with $4k + 2$ cones have a tight spanning ratio of $1 / (1 - 2 \sin(\theta/2))$. We provide lower bounds for ordered $\theta$-graphs with $4k + 3$ and $4k + 5$ cones. For ordered $\theta$-graphs with $4k + 2$ and $4k + 5$ cones these lower bounds are strictly greater than the worst case spanning ratios of their unordered counterparts. These are the first results showing that ordered $\theta$-graphs have worse spanning ratios than unordered $\theta$-graphs. Finally, we show that, unlike their unordered counterparts, the ordered $\theta$-graphs with 4, 5, and 6 cones are not spanners

Routing on the Visibility Graph

We consider the problem of routing on a network in the presence of line segment constraints (i.e., obstacles that edges in our network are not allowed to cross). Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in the plane and let $S$ be a set of non-crossing line segments whose endpoints are in $P$. We present two deterministic 1-local $O(1)$-memory routing algorithms that are guaranteed to find a path of at most linear size between any pair of vertices of the \emph{visibility graph} of $P$ with respect to a set of constraints $S$ (i.e., the algorithms never look beyond the direct neighbours of the current location and store only a constant amount of additional information). Contrary to {\em all} existing deterministic local routing algorithms, our routing algorithms do not route on a plane subgraph of the visibility graph. Additionally, we provide lower bounds on the routing ratio of any deterministic local routing algorithm on the visibility graph.Comment: An extended abstract of this paper appeared in the proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2017). Final version appeared in the Journal of Computational Geometr

On the stretch factor of the Theta-4 graph

In this paper we show that the \theta-graph with 4 cones has constant stretch factor, i.e., there is a path between any pair of vertices in this graph whose length is at most a constant times the Euclidean distance between that pair of vertices. This is the last \theta-graph for which it was not known whether its stretch factor was bounded

Upper and Lower Bounds for Competitive Online Routing on Delaunay Triangulations

Consider a weighted graph G where vertices are points in the plane and edges are line segments. The weight of each edge is the Euclidean distance between its two endpoints. A routing algorithm on G has a competitive ratio of c if the length of the path produced by the algorithm from any vertex s to any vertex t is at most c times the length of the shortest path from s to t in G. If the length of the path is at most c times the Euclidean distance from s to t, we say that the routing algorithm on G has a routing ratio of c.We present an online routing algorithm on the Delaunay triangulation with competitive and routing ratios of 5.90. This improves upon the best known algorithm that has competitive and routing ratio 15.48. The algorithm is a generalization of the deterministic 1-local routing algorithm by Chew on the L1-Delaunay triangulation. When a message follows the routing path produced by our algorithm, its header need only contain the coordinates of s and t. This is an improvement over the currently known competitive routing algorithms on the Delaunay triangulation, for which the header of a message must additionally contain partial sums of distances along the routing path.We also show that the routing ratio of any deterministic k-local algorithm is at least 1.70 for the Delaunay triangulation and 2.70 for the L1-Delaunay triangulation. In the case of the L1-Delaunay triangulation, this implies that even though there exists a path between two points x and y whose length is at most 2.61|[xy]| (where |[xy]| denotes the length of the line segment [xy]), it is not always possible to route a message along a path of length less than 2.70|[xy]|. From these bounds on the routing ratio, we derive lower bounds on the competitive ratio of 1.23 for Delaunay triangulations and 1.12 for L1-Delaunay triangulations