On (Directed) Width-Parameters of Geometric Spanners

Abstract

To speed up algorithms on geometric graphs, it is common to approximate the complete Euclidean graph while maintaining certain geometric properties. A (directed) $t$-spanner $G$ for a point set $P$ in the Euclidean space is a (directed) graph such that for every pair of points, the shortest path in $G$ is at most a factor $t$ longer than the Euclidean distance between those points. In this paper, we investigate $t$-spanners that are bounded by certain graph parameters. Let $\kappa$ be a graph parameter. We show that for path-width, branch-width and cut-width there is an $\mathcal{O}(n/k^{d/(d-1)})$-spanner $G$ on $P$ with $\kappa (G)=k$ and that this is asymptotically worst-case optimal. In ${\mathbb{R}}^2$ we show the same bounds for planar graphs of clique-width or rank-width $k$. In contrast, for tree-depth, we show that there are sets of points for which the dilation cannot be bounded. Therefore, we investigate computing a spanner with tree-depth $k$ and minimum dilation. We show that already for tree-depth $3$ this problem is NP-hard to approximate within any factor strictly less than $\sqrt{2}$, and present an XP-algorithm to compute for a given tree-depth $k$ a graph with dilation at most $2t^{\ast }$, where $t^{\ast }$ is the minimum dilation. We further extend these results to obtain directed $\mathcal{O}(n/k^{d/(d-1)})$-spanners $G$ with $\kappa (G)=k$ for $\kappa$ being directed tree-width, directed path-width or DAG-width and show that also in the directed case, this is asymptotically worst-case optimal.

Accepted at ISAAC 2026