Distributed Spanner Construction in Doubling Metric Spaces

This paper presents a distributed algorithm that runs on an n-node unit ball graph (UBG) G residing in a metric space of constant doubling dimension, and constructs, for any e 0, a (1 + e)-spanner H of G with maximum degree bounded above by a constant. In addition, we show that H is “lightweight”, in the following sense. Let Δ denote the aspect ratio of G, that is, the ratio of the length of a longest edge in G to the length of a shortest edge in G. The total weight of H is bounded above by O(logΔ) · wt(MST), where MST denotes a minimum spanning tree of the metric space. Finally, we show that H satisfies the so called leapfrog property, an immediate implication being that, for the special case of Euclidean metric spaces with fixed dimension, the weight of H is bounded above by O(wt(MST)). Thus, the current result subsumes the results of the authors in PODC 2006 that apply to Euclidean metric spaces, and extends these results to metric spaces with constant doubling dimension.