Deterministic Distributed (Delta + o(Delta))-Edge-Coloring, and Vertex-Coloring of Graphs with Bounded Diversity
Leonid Barenboim, Michael Elkin, Tzalik Maimon · 2017
In the distributed message-passing setting a communication network is represented by a graph whose vertices represent processors that perform local computations and communicate over the edges of the graph. In the distributed edge-coloring problem the processors are required to assign colors to edges, such that all edges incident on the same vertex are assigned distinct colors. The previously-known deterministic algorithms for edge-coloring employed at least (2Δ - 1) colors, even though any graph admits an edge-coloring with Δ + 1 colors [36]. Moreover, the previously-known deterministic algorithms that employed at most O(Δ) colors required superlogarithmic time [3,6,7,17]. In the current paper we devise deterministic edge-coloring algorithms that employ only Δ + o(Δ) colors, for a very wide family of graphs. Specifically, as long as the arboricity a of the graph is a = O(Δ1 - ε), for a constant ε > 0, our algorithm computes such a coloring within polylogarithmic deterministic time. We also devise significantly improved deterministic edge-coloring algorithms for general graphs for a very wide range of parameters. Specifically, for any value κ in the range [4Δ, 2o(log Δ) ⋅ Δ], our κ-edge-coloring algorithm has smaller running time than the best previously-known κ-edge-coloring algorithms. Our algorithms are actually much more general, since edge-coloring is equivalent to vertex-coloring of line graphs. Our method is applicable to vertex-coloring of the family of graphs with bounded diversity that contains line graphs, line graphs of hypergraphs, and many other graphs. We significantly improve upon previous vertex-coloring of such graphs, and as an implication also obtain the improved edge-coloring algorithms for general graphs.