Approximate distance oracles for unweighted graphs in expected O(n²) time

Abstract

Let G = (V, E) be an undirected graph on n vertices, and let δ(u, v) denote the distance in G between two vertices u and v. Thorup and Zwick showed that for any positive integer t, the graph G can be preprocessed to build a data structure that can efficiently report t-approximate distance between any pair of vertices. That is, for any u, v∈V, the distance reported is at least d(u, v) and at most tδ(u, v). The remarkable feature of this data structure is that, for t≥3, it occupies subquadratic space, that is, it does not store all-pairs distances explicitly, and still it can answer any t-approximate distance query in constant time. They named the data structure "approximate distance oracle" because of this feature. Furthermore, the trade-off between the stretch t and the size of the data structure is essentially optimal.In this article, we show that we can actually construct approximate distance oracles in expected O(n²) time if the graph is unweighted. One of the new ideas used in the improved algorithm also leads to the first expected linear-time algorithm for computing an optimal size (2, 1)-spanner of an unweighted graph. A (2, 1) spanner of an undirected unweighted graph G = (V, E) is a subgraph (V, Ê), Ê⊆E, such that for any two vertices u and v in the graph, their distance in the subgraph is at most 2δ(u, v) + 1.