Geometric Spanners for Points Inside a Polygonal Domain

Abstract

Let P be a set of n points inside a polygonal domain D. A polygonal domain with h holes (or obstacles) consists of h disjoint polygonal obstacles surrounded by a simple polygon which itself acts as an obstacle. We first study t-spanners for the set P with respect to the geodesic distance function d where for any two points p and q, d(p,q) is equal to the Euclidean length of the shortest path from p to q that avoids the obstacles interiors. For a case where the polygonal domain is a simple polygon (i.e., h=0), we construct a (sqrt(10)+eps)-spanner that has O(n log^2 n) edges where eps is the a given positive real number. For a case where there are h holes, our construction gives a (5+eps)-spanner with the size of O(sqrt(h) n log^2 n).
 
Moreover, we study t-spanners for the visibility graph of P (VG(P), for short) with respect to a hole-free polygonal domain D. The graph VG(P) is not necessarily a complete graph or even connected. In this case, we propose an algorithm that constructs a (3+eps)-spanner of size almost O(n^{4/3}). In addition, we show that there is a set P of n points such that any (3-eps)-spanner of VG(P) must contain almost n^2 edges.