Collective Additive Tree Spanners of Bounded Tree-Breadth Graphs with Generalizations and Consequences

In this paper, we study collective additive tree spanners for families of graphs enjoying special Robertson-Seymour’s tree-decompositions, and demonstrate interesting consequences of obtained results. We say that a graph G admits a system of μ collective additive tree r-spanners (resp., multiplicative tree t-spanners) if there is a system T (G) of at most μ spanning trees of G such that for any two vertices x, y of G a spanning tree T ∈ T (G) exists such that dT (x, y) ≤ dG(x, y) + r (resp., dT (x, y) ≤ t · dG(x, y)). When μ = 1 one gets the notion of additive tree r-spanner (resp., multiplicative tree t-spanner). It is known that if a graph G has a multiplicative tree t-spanner, then G admits a Robertson-Seymour’s tree-decomposition with bags of radius at most ⌈t/2⌉ in G. We use this to demonstrate that there is a polynomial time algorithm that, given an n-vertex graph G admitting a multiplicative tree t-spanner, constructs a system of at most log2 n collective additive tree O(t log n)-spanners of G. That is, with a slight increase in the number of trees and in the stretch, one can “turn” a multiplicative tree spanner into a small set of collective additive tree spanners. We extend this result by showing that if a graph G admits a multiplicative t-spanner with tree-width k − 1, then G admits a Robertson-Seymour’s tree-decomposition each bag of which can be covered with at most k disks of G of radius at most ⌈t/2⌉ each. This is used to demonstrate that, for every fixed k, there is a polynomial time algorithm that, given an n-vertex graph G admitting a multiplicative t-spanner with tree-width k − 1, constructs a system of at most k(1 + log2 n) collective additive tree O(t log n)-spanners of G.