Communication-Efficient ∆-Stepping for Distributed Computing Systems
Haomeng Zhang, Junfei Xie, Xinyu Zhang · 2023
This paper considers the single source shortest path (SSSP) problem, which is the key for many applications such as navigation, mapping, routing, and social networking. Existing SSSP algorithms are designed mostly for shared-memory systems. Nevertheless, with the prevalence of diverse smart devices like drones, there is a growing interest in deploying SSSP algorithms over distributed computing systems so that they can run efficiently onboard of smart devices via Mobile Ad Hoc Computing or at the network edges via Mobile Edge Computing. In this paper, we introduce a communication-efficient ∆-stepping algorithm for distributed computing systems. The proposed algorithm is featured by 1) a message coordination architecture for reducing message exchanges between workers, 2) a pruning technique for reducing redundant computations, and 3) an aggregation technique for further reducing message exchanges when communication delay is significant. Theoretical analyses and experimental studies on real-world graph datasets demonstrate the promising performance of proposed algorithm.