Near-Optimal Dynamic Steiner Spanners for Constant-Curvature Spaces

Abstract

We consider Steiner spanners in Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries. In the Euclidean setting, a recent line of work initiated by Le and Solomon [FOCS'19] and further improved by Chang et al. [SoCG'24] obtained Steiner (1+ε)-spanners of size O_d(ε^{(1-d)/2} log(1/ε) n), nearly matching the lower bound Ω_d(ε^{(1-d)/2} n) of Bhore and Tóth [SIDMA'22].
We obtain Steiner (1+ε)-spanners of size O_d(ε^{(1-d)/2} log(1/ε)n) not only in d-dimensional Euclidean space, but also in d-dimensional spherical and hyperbolic space. For any fixed dimension d, the obtained edge count is optimal up to an O(log(1/ε)) factor in each of these spaces. Unlike earlier constructions, our Steiner spanners are based on simple quadtrees, and they can be dynamically maintained, leading to efficient data structures for dynamic approximate nearest neighbours and bichromatic closest pair.
In the hyperbolic setting, we also show that 2-spanners in the hyperbolic plane must have Ω(nlog n) edges, and we obtain a 2-spanner of size O_d(nlog n) in d-dimensional hyperbolic space, matching our lower bound for any constant d. Finally, we give a Steiner spanner with additive error ε in hyperbolic space with O_d(ε^{(1-d)/2} log(α(n)/ε)n) edges, where α(n) is the inverse Ackermann function.
Our techniques generalize to closed orientable surfaces of constant curvature as well as to some other quotient spaces.