Designing sparse temporal graphs satisfying connectivity requirements

TL;DR

This paper explores the minimal number of temporal edges needed to satisfy partial connectivity requests in directed and undirected graphs, providing complexity results and characterizations.

Contribution

It introduces the Connectivity Request Satisfaction problem, deriving formulas for directed graphs and characterizations for undirected graphs, with complexity analyses.

Findings

Directed case: edges needed = n - cc + dfvs, with NP-completeness.

Undirected case: strongly connected request graphs admit solutions with n-1 edges under specific conditions.

Polynomial-time test for the characterization of undirected solutions.

Abstract

Connectivity of temporal graphs has been widely studied both as graph theory and as gossip theory. In particular, it is well known that in order to connect every vertex to every other, a temporal graph needs to have at least $2n-4$ edges where $n$ is the number of vertices. This paper investigates the optimal number of edges required to satisfy partial connectivity requirements. We introduce the problem of Connectivity Request Satisfaction where we are given a directed graph that we call the request graph, where an arc from $u$ to $v$ means that we need to be able to go from $u$ to $v$. Our goal is to build a temporal graph on the same vertex set with as few temporal edges as possible that would satisfy all the requests. When the graph we build is directed, we prove that the number of temporal arcs required is $n-\mathrm{cc}+\mathrm{dfvs}$ where $\mathrm{cc}$ is the number of connected component of the request graph and $\mathrm{dfvs}$ is the size of its smallest directed feedback vertex set. It follows that the problem is NP-complete but inherits fixed parameter tractability properties of Directed Feedback Vertex Set. When the graph we build is undirected, we establish a characterization of strongly connected request graphs that admit a solution with $n-1$ edges: it is possible if and only if any set of pairwise non-vertex-disjoint closed walks all share a common vertex. We prove that this criteria can be tested in polynomial time.