Metric and Geometric Spanners that are Resilient to Degree-Bounded Edge Faults

TL;DR

This paper constructs resilient metric and geometric spanners that maintain approximate shortest paths despite degree-bounded edge faults, with efficient bounds on size and stretch factor for various metric spaces.

Contribution

It introduces new resilient spanner constructions for complete graphs over metric spaces, extending previous fault-tolerance notions to degree-bounded edge failures.

Findings

Constructed $O(fm)$-edge spanners for complete metric spaces with stretch $O(ft)$.

Developed $(2f+1)^2 m$-edge spanners with stretch $1+\varepsilon$ for spaces with well-separated pair decompositions.

Presented $O(fn)$-edge resilient spanners for Euclidean spaces using variants of Yao- and $\Theta$-graphs.

Abstract

Let $H$ be an edge-weighted graph, and let $G$ be a subgraph of $H$. We say that $G$ is an $f$-fault-tolerant $t$-spanner for $H$, if the following is true for any subset $F$ of at most $f$ edges of $G$: For any two vertices $p$ and $q$, the shortest-path distance between $p$ and $q$ in the graph $G \setminus F$ is at most $t$ times the shortest-path distance between $p$ and $q$ in the graph $H \setminus F$. Recently, Bodwin, Haeupler, and Parter generalized this notion to the case when $F$ can be any set of edges in $G$, as long as the maximum degree of $F$ is at most $f$. They gave constructions for general graphs $H$. We first consider the case when $H$ is a complete graph whose vertex set is an arbitrary metric space. We show that if this metric space contains a $t$-spanner with $m$ edges, then it also contains a graph $G$ with $O(fm)$ edges, that is resilient to edge faults of maximum degree $f$ and has stretch factor $O(ft)$. Next, we consider the case when $H$ is a complete graph whose vertex set is a metric space that admits a well-separated pair decomposition. We show that, if the metric space has such a decomposition of size $m$, then it contains a graph with at most $(2f+1)^2 m$ edges, that is resilient to edge faults of maximum degree $f$ and has stretch factor at most $1+\varepsilon$, for any given $\varepsilon > 0$. For example, if the vertex set is a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ ($d$ being a constant) or a set of $n$ points in a metric space of bounded doubling dimension, then the spanner has $O(f^2 n)$ edges. Finally, for the case when $H$ is a complete graph on $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we show how natural variants of the Yao- and $\Theta$-graphs lead to graphs with $O(fn)$ edges, that are resilient to edge faults of maximum degree $f$ and have stretch factor at most $1+\varepsilon$, for any given $\varepsilon > 0$.