Sparse distance preservers and additive spanners

• Authors: Béla Bollobás;Don Coppersmith;Michael Elkin
• Venue: SODA '03 Proceedings of the fourteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
• Year: 2003

For an unweighted graph G = (V, E), G′ = (V, E′) is a subgraph if E′ ⊆ E, and G″ = (V″, E″, ω) is a Steiner graph if V ⊆ V″, and for any pair of vertices u, w ∈ V, the distance bet-ween them in G″(denoted dG″, (u, w)) is at least the distance between them in G (denoted da(u, w)).In this paperwe introduce the notion of distance preserver. A subgraph (resp., Steiner graph) G′ of a graph G is a subgraph (resp., Steiner) D-preserver of G if for every pair of vertices u, w ∈ V with dG(u, w) ≥ D, dG′, (u, w) = dG(u, w). We show that anygraph (resp., digraph) has a subgraph D-preserver with at most O(n2/D) edges (resp., arcs), and there are graphs and digraphs for which any undirected Steiner D-preserver contains Ω(n2/D) edges. However, we show that if one allows a directed Steiner (or, shortly, diS-teiner) D-preserver, then these bounds can be improved. Specifically, we show that for any graph or digraph there exists a diSteiner D-preserver with O(n2.log D/D.log n arcs, and that this result is tight up to a constant factor.We also study D-preserving distance labeling schemes, that are labeling schemes that guarantee precise calculation ofdistances between pairs of vertices that are at distance at least D one from another. We show that there exists a D-preserving labeling scheme with labels of size O(n/Dlog2 n), and that labels of size Ω(n/D log D) are required for any D-preserving labeling scheme.Finally, we study additive spanners. A subgraph G′ of an undirected graph G = (V, E) is its additive β-spanner if for any pair of vertices u, w ∈ V, dG′, (u, w) ≤ dG(u, w)+β. It is known that for any n-vertex graph there exists an additive 2-spanner with O(n3/2) edges, and an additive Steiner 4-spanner with O(n4/3) edges. However, no construction of additive spanners with o(n3/2) edges or Steiner additive spanners with o(n4/3) edges are known so far. We devise a construction of additive O(21/δn(1-δ)[1/δ]--2/[1/δ]--1)-spanner with O(n1+δ) edges for any graph and any δ