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oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:12933 2024-03-06T10:51:07Z ddc:004 open_access

Light Euclidean Spanners with Steiner Points Le, Hung Solomon, Shay Euclidean spanners Steiner spanners light spanners The FOCS'19 paper of Le and Solomon [Hung Le and Shay Solomon, 2019], culminating a long line of research on Euclidean spanners, proves that the lightness (normalized weight) of the greedy (1+ε)-spanner in ℝ^d is Õ(ε^{-d}) for any d = O(1) and any ε = Ω(n^{-1/(d-1)}) (where Õ hides polylogarithmic factors of 1/ε), and also shows the existence of point sets in ℝ^d for which any (1+ε)-spanner must have lightness Ω(ε^{-d}). Given this tight bound on the lightness, a natural arising question is whether a better lightness bound can be achieved using Steiner points. Our first result is a construction of Steiner spanners in ℝ² with lightness O(ε^{-1} log Δ), where Δ is the spread of the point set. In the regime of Δ ≪ 2^(1/ε), this provides an improvement over the lightness bound of [Hung Le and Shay Solomon, 2019]; this regime of parameters is of practical interest, as point sets arising in real-life applications (e.g., for various random distributions) have polynomially bounded spread, while in spanner applications ε often controls the precision, and it sometimes needs to be much smaller than O(1/log n). Moreover, for spread polynomially bounded in 1/ε, this upper bound provides a quadratic improvement over the non-Steiner bound of [Hung Le and Shay Solomon, 2019], We then demonstrate that such a light spanner can be constructed in O_ε(n) time for polynomially bounded spread, where O_ε hides a factor of poly(1/(ε)). Finally, we extend the construction to higher dimensions, proving a lightness upper bound of Õ(ε^{-(d+1)/2} + ε^{-2} log Δ) for any 3 ≤ d = O(1) and any ε = Ω(n^{-1/(d-1)}). Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Hung Le and Shay Solomon 2020 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 173, 28th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2020) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2020.67 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-129331 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2020.67 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode