Time Lower Bounds for Distributed Distance Oracles

Distributed distance oracles consist of a labeling scheme which assigns a label to each node and a local data structure deployed to each node. When a node v wants to know the distance to a node u, it queries its local data structure with the label of u. The data structure returns an estimated distance to u, which must be larger than the actual distance but can be overestimated. The accuracy of the distance oracle is measured by stretch, which is defined as the maximum ratio between actual distances and estimated distances over all pairs (u, v).