Improved Weighted Additive Spanners

Graph spanners and emulators are sparse structures that approximately preserve distances of the original graph. While there has been an extensive amount of work on additive spanners, so far little attention was given to weighted graphs. Only very recently [Abu Reyan Ahmed et al., 2020] extended the classical +2 (respectively, +4) spanners for unweighted graphs of size O(n^{3/2}) (resp., O(n^{7/5})) to the weighted setting, where the additive error is +2W (resp., +4W). This means that for every pair u,v, the additive stretch is at most +2W_{u,v}, where W_{u,v} is the maximal edge weight on the shortest u-v path (weights are normalized so that the minimum edge weight is 1). In addition, [Abu Reyan Ahmed et al., 2020] showed a randomized algorithm yielding a +8W_{max} spanner of size O(n^{4/3}), here W_{max} is the maximum edge weight in the entire graph. In this work we improve the latter result by devising a simple deterministic algorithm for a +(6+ε)W spanner for weighted graphs with size O(n^{4/3}) (for any constant ε > 0), thus nearly matching the classical +6 spanner of size O(n^{4/3}) for unweighted graphs. Furthermore, we show a +(2+ε)W subsetwise spanner of size O(n⋅√{|S|}), improving the +4W_{max} result of [Abu Reyan Ahmed et al., 2020] (that had the same size). We also show a simple randomized algorithm for a +4W emulator of size Õ(n^{4/3}). In addition, we show that our technique is applicable for very sparse additive spanners, that have linear size. It is known that such spanners must suffer polynomially large stretch. For weighted graphs, we use a variant of our simple deterministic algorithm that yields a linear size +Õ(√n⋅ W) spanner, and we also obtain a tradeoff between size and stretch. Finally, generalizing the technique of [D. Dor et al., 2000] for unweighted graphs, we devise an efficient randomized algorithm producing a +2W spanner for weighted graphs of size Õ(n^{3/2}) in Õ(n²) time.