Almost Linear 3-Spanners of Temporal Cliques

2026-09-02

AI Summary

本文提出一种递归算法，用于解决时态团中计算近似最小跳数的问题，通过构造几乎线性的3-跨度子图来改进先前的上界。

Abstract

Temporal graphs model dynamic networks by assigning positive integer time labels to the edges, while information propagates along temporal paths, whose edge labels are traversed in nondecreasing order. A temporal $α$-spanner of a temporal graph with $n$ vertices is a temporal subgraph that approximates the minimum-hop temporal distance between every pair of vertices within a factor of $α$. While general temporal graphs may not admit sparse temporal $α$-spanners for any value of $α$, temporal cliques are known to admit temporal $(2k-1)$-spanners of size $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(kn^{1+1/k})$ for every positive integer $k$. We present a simple recursive algorithm that computes, for every temporal clique on $n$ vertices, a temporal $3$-spanner of size $n^{1+2/\sqrt{\ln n}}=n^{1+o(1)}$, thereby improving the previous best upper bound of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^{3/2})$. We also show that a modified version of our algorithm computes temporal $3$-spanners of size $\mathcal{O}(nL)$ when the lifetime is bounded by $L$, i.e., all time labels are in $\{1,\ldots,L\}$, thus improving the previous bound of $\mathcal{O}(2^Ln\log n)$. Both results are particularly striking in light of the known lower bound of $Ω(n^2)$ on the size of temporal $2$-spanners, which already holds for temporal cliques of lifetime $L\geq 3$. Both algorithms rely on a new simple recursive decomposition that certifies temporal connectivity for a large collection of source-target pairs using only $\mathcal{O}(n)$ carefully selected edges and recursively processes only the remaining pairs. Besides yielding substantially improved upper bounds, this approach is significantly simpler than previous constructions.

Problem

• Temporal Graphs
• 3-Spanners
• Temporal Cliques

Innovation

• temporal 3-spanner
• recursive algorithm
• temporal connectivity
• time labels
• spanner size