Tree-Like Shortcuttings of Trees
Le, Hung, Lazar Milenković, Shay Solomon, Cuong V. Than · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2025
Sparse shortcuttings of trees - equivalently, sparse 1-spanners for tree metrics with bounded hop-diameter - have been studied extensively (under different names and settings), since the pioneering works of [Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, 1982; Chazelle, 1987; Noga Alon and Baruch Schieber, 1987; Hans L. Bodlaender et al., 1994], initially motivated by applications to range queries, online tree product, and MST verification, to name a few. These constructions were also lifted from trees to other graph families using known low-distortion embedding results. The works of [Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, 1982; Chazelle, 1987; Noga Alon and Baruch Schieber, 1987; Hans L. Bodlaender et al., 1994] establish a tight tradeoff between hop-diameter and sparsity (or average degree) for tree shortcuttings and imply constant-hop shortcuttings for n-node trees with sparsity O(log^* n). Despite their small sparsity, all known constant-hop shortcuttings contain dense subgraphs (of sparsity Ω(log n)), which is a significant drawback for many applications. We initiate a systematic study of constant-hop tree shortcuttings that are "tree-like". We focus on two well-studied graph parameters that measure how far a graph is from a tree: arboricity and treewidth. Our contribution is twofold. - New upper and lower bounds for tree-like shortcuttings of trees, including an optimal tradeoff between hop-diameter and treewidth for all hop-diameter up to O(log log n). We also provide a lower bound for larger values of k, which together yield hop-diameter× treewidth = Ω((log log n)²) for all values of hop-diameter, resolving an open question of [Arnold Filtser and Hung Le, 2022; H. Le, 2023]. - Applications of these bounds, focusing on low-dimensional Euclidean and doubling metrics. A seminal work of Arya et al. [S. Arya et al., 1995] presented a (1+ε)-spanner with constant hop-diameter and sparsity O(log^* n), but with large arboricity. We show that constant hop-diameter is sufficient to achieve arboricity O(log^*{n}). Furthermore, we present a (1+ε)-stretch routing scheme in the fixed-port model with 3 hops and a local memory of O(log²n / log log n) bits, resolving an open question of [Omri Kahalon et al., 2022].