Light Euclidean Spanners with Steiner Points

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)}).