New Distributed Interactive Proofs for Planarity: A Matter of Left and Right

Abstract

We provide new distributed interactive proofs (DIP) for planarity and related graph families. The notion of a distributed interactive proof (DIP) was introduced by Kol, Oshman, and Saxena (PODC 2018). In this setting, the verifier consists of n nodes connected by a communication graph G. The prover is a single entity that communicates with all nodes by short messages. The goal is to verify that the graph G satisfies a certain property (e.g., planarity) in a small number of rounds, and with a small communication bound, denoted as the proof size.
Prior work by Naor, Parter and Yogev (SODA 2020) presented a DIP for planarity that uses three interaction rounds and a proof size of O(log n). Feuilloley et al. (PODC 2020) showed that the same can be achieved with a single interaction round and without randomization, by providing a proof labeling scheme with a proof size of O(log n). In a subsequent work, Bousquet, Feuilloley, and Pierron (OPODIS 2021) achieved the same bound for related graph families such as outerplanarity, series-parallel graphs, and graphs of treewidth at most 2. In this work, we design new DIPs that use exponentially shorter proofs compared to the state-of-the-art bounds. Our main results are:  
- There is a 5-round protocol with O(log log n) proof size for outerplanarity. 
- There is a 5-round protocol with O(log log n) proof size for verifying embedded planarity and O(log log n+log Δ) proof size for general planar graphs, where Δ is the maximum degree in the graph. In the former setting, it is assumed that an embedding of the graph is given (e.g., each node holds a clockwise orientation of its neighbors) and the goal is to verify that it is a valid planar embedding. The latter result should be compared with the non-interactive setting for which there is lower bound of Ω(log n) bits for graphs with Δ = O(1) by Feuilloley et al. (PODC 2020). 
- The non-interactive deterministic lower bound of Ω(log n) bits by Feuilloley et al. (PODC 2020) can be extended to hold even if the verifier is randomized. Moreover, the lower bound holds even with the assumption that the verifier’s randomness comes in the form of an unbounded random string shared among the nodes.  We also show that our DIPs can be extended to protocols with similar bounds for verifying series-parallel graphs and graphs with tree-width at most 2. Perhaps surprisingly, our results demonstrate that the key technical barrier for obtaining o(log log n) labels for all our problems is a basic sorting verification task in which all nodes are embedded on an oriented path P ⊆ G and it is desired for each node to distinguish between its left and right G-neighbors.