Lower bounds for dynamic connectivity

We prove an Ω(lg Erik n) cell-probe lower bound on maintaining connectivity in dynamic graphs, as well as a more general trade-off between updates and queries. Our bound holds even if the graph is formed by disjoint paths, and thus also applies to trees and plane graphs. The bound is known to be tight for these restricted cases, proving optimality of these data structures (e. g., Sleator and Tarjan's dynamic trees). Our trade-off is known to be tight for trees, and the best two data structures for dynamic connectivity in general graphs are points on our trade-off curve. In this sense these two data structures are optimal, and this tightness serves as strong evidence that our lower bounds are the best possible. From a more theoretical perspective, our result is the first logarithmic cell-probe lower bound for any problem in the natural class of dynamic language membership problems, breaking the long standing record of Ω(lg n / lg lg n). In this sense, our result is the first data-structure lower bound that is "truly" logarithmic, i. e., logarithmic in the problem size counted in bits. Obtaining such a bound is listed as one of three major challenges for future research by Miltersen [13] (the other two challenges remain unsolved). Our techniques form a general framework for proving cell-probe lower bounds on dynamic data structures. We show how our framework also applies to the partial-sums problem to obtain a nearly complete understanding of the problem in cell-probe and algebraic models, solving several previously posed open problems.