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Single-Criteria Metric r-Dominating Set Problem via Minor-Preserving Support

Authors Reilly Browne , Hsien-Chih Chang

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Computational geometry
  • Mathematics of computing → Graph theory
Keywords
  • Minimum dominating set
  • planar graphs
  • shallow cell complexity

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Abstract

Given an unweighted graph G, the minimum r-dominating set problem asks for a subset of vertices S of the smallest cardinality, such that every vertex in G is within radius r to some vertex in S. While the r-dominating set problem on planar graph admits PTAS from Baker’s shifting/layering technique when r is a constant, the problem becomes significantly harder when r can depend on n. In fact, under Exponential-Time Hypothesis, Fox-Epstein ηl [SODA 2019] observed that no efficient PTAS can exist for the unbounded r-dominating set problem on planar graphs. One may consider even harder weighted-variant known as the vertex-weighted metric r-dominating set, where edges are associated with lengths, and every vertex is associated with a positive-valued weight, and the goal is to compute an r-dominating set with minimum total weight. As a result, people resorted to bicriteria algorithms by allowing the returned solution to use radius-(1+ε)r balls instead, in addition to the total weight being a 1+ε approximation to the optimal value.
We establish the first single-criteria polynomial-time O(1)-approximation algorithm for the vertex-weighted metric r-dominating set problem on planar graphs when r is part of the input, and can be arbitrarily large compared to n. Our new (single-criteria) O(1)-approximation algorithm uses the quasi-uniformity sampling technique of Chan et al. [SODA 2012] by bounding the shallow cell complexity of the (unbounded) radius-r ball system to be linear in n. To this end we have two technical innovations:  
1) The discrete ball system on planar graphs are neither pseudodisks nor have well-defined boundaries for standard union-complexity arguments. We construct a support graph for arbitrary distance ball systems as contractions of Voronoi cells; the sparseness comes as a byproduct. 
2) We present an assignment of each depth-(≥3) cell to a unique 3-tuple of ball centers. This allows us to use standard Clarkson-Shor techniques to reduce the counting to cells of depth exactly 3, which we prove to be size O(n) by a novel geometric argument based on our support being a Voronoi contraction.

Cite As Get BibTex

Reilly Browne and Hsien-Chih Chang. Single-Criteria Metric r-Dominating Set Problem via Minor-Preserving Support. In 42nd International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 367, pp. 24:1-24:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2026.24

Author Details

Reilly Browne
  • Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
Hsien-Chih Chang
  • Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

Funding

  • Browne, Reilly: Supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award under the Grant No. CCF-2443017.
  • Chang, Hsien-Chih: Supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award under the Grant No. CCF-2443017.

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