Faster Deterministic All Pairs Shortest Paths in Congest Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a faster deterministic distributed algorithm for all pairs shortest paths in weighted graphs within the Congest model, improving previous round complexity bounds through novel techniques for blocker set construction and distance propagation.

Contribution

It presents a new deterministic algorithm with improved round complexity for distributed weighted APSP, utilizing innovative methods for blocker set construction and distance value propagation.

Findings

Achieves $ ilde{O}(n^{4/3})$ rounds in the Congest model.

Introduces a deterministic technique for constructing blocker sets.

Develops a pipelined method for propagating distances deterministically.

Abstract

We present a new deterministic algorithm for distributed weighted all pairs shortest paths (APSP) in both undirected and directed graphs. Our algorithm runs in $\tilde{O}(n^{4/3})$ rounds in the Congest models on graphs with arbitrary edge weights, and it improves on the previous $\tilde{O}(n^{3/2})$ bound of Agarwal et al. [ARKP18]. The main components of our new algorithm are a new faster technique for constructing blocker set deterministically and a new pipelined method for deterministically propagating distance values from source nodes to the blocker set nodes in the network. Both of these techniques have potential applications to other distributed algorithms. Our new deterministic algorithm for computing blocker set adapts the NC approximate hypergraph set cover algorithm in [BRS94] to the distributed construction of a blocker set. It follows the two-step process of first designing a randomized algorithm that uses only pairwise independence, and then derandomizes this algorithm using a sample space of linear size. This algorithm runs in almost the same number of rounds as the initial step in our APSP algorithm that computes $h$-hops shortest paths, and significantly improves on the deterministic blocker set algorithms in [ARKP18, AR19] by removing an additional $n\cdot |Q|$ term in the round bound, where Q is the blocker set. The other new component in our APSP algorithm is a deterministic pipelined approach to propagate distance values from source nodes to blocker nodes. We use a simple natural round-robin method for this step, and we show using a suitable progress measure that it achieve the $\tilde{O}(n^{4/3})$ bound on the number of rounds. It appears that the standard deterministic methods for efficiently broadcasting multiple values, and for sending or receiving messages using the routing schedule in [HPDG+19,LSP19] do not apply to this setting.