We study the problem of answering k-hop reachability queries in a directed
graph, i.e., whether there exists a directed path of length k, from a source
query vertex to a target query vertex in the input graph. The problem of k-hop
reachability is a general problem of the classic reachability (where
k=infinity). Existing indexes for processing classic reachability queries, as
well as for processing shortest path queries, are not applicable or not
efficient for processing k-hop reachability queries. We propose an index for
processing k-hop reachability queries, which is simple in design and efficient
to construct. Our experimental results on a wide range of real datasets show
that our index is more efficient than the state-of-the-art indexes even for
processing classic reachability queries, for which these indexes are primarily
designed. We also show that our index is efficient in answering k-hop
reachability queries.Comment: VLDB201