Greedy embedding (or drawing) is a simple and efficient strategy to route messages in wireless sensor networks. For each source-destination pair of nodes s, t in a greedy embedding there is always a neighbor u of s that is closer to t according to some distance metric. The existence of greedy embeddings in the Euclidean plane R^2 is known for certain graph classes such as 3-connected planar graphs. We completely characterize the trees that admit a greedy embedding in R^2. This answers a question by Angelini et al. (Graph Drawing 2009) and is a further step in characterizing the graphs that admit Euclidean greedy embeddings.
A graph drawing is $\textit{greedy}$ if, for every ordered pair of vertices $(x,y)$, there is a path from $x$ to $y$ such that the Euclidean distance to $y$ decreases monotonically at every vertex of the path. Greedy drawings support a simple geometric routing scheme, in which any node that has to send a packet to a destination "greedily" forwards the packet to any neighbor that is closer to the destination than itself, according to the Euclidean distance in the drawing. In a greedy drawing such a neighbor always exists and hence this routing scheme is guaranteed to succeed. In 2004 Papadimitr…
Geographic routing is a routing paradigm, which uses geographic coordinates of network nodes to determine routes. Greedy routing, the simplest form of geographic routing forwards a packet to the closest neighbor towards the destination. A greedy embedding is a embedding of a graph on a geometric space such that greedy routing always guarantees delivery. A Schnyder drawing is a classical way to draw a planar graph. In this manuscript, we show that every Schnyder drawing is a greedy embedding, based on a generalized definition of greedy routing.
A drawing of a graph is greedy if for each ordered pair of vertices u and v, there is a path from u to v such that the Euclidean distance to v decreases monotonically at every vertex of the path. The existence of greedy drawings has been widely studied under different topological and geometric constraints, such as planarity, face convexity, and drawing succinctness. We introduce greedy rectilinear drawings, in which each edge is either a horizontal or a vertical segment. These drawings have several properties that improve human readability and support network routing. We address the problem of…
We describe an efficient method for drawing any n-vertex simple graph G in the hyperbolic plane. Our algorithm produces greedy drawings, which support greedy geometric routing, so that a message M between any pair of vertices may be routed geometrically, simply by having each vertex that receives M pass it along to any neighbor that is closer in the hyperbolic metric to the message's eventual destination. More importantly, for networking applications, our algorithm produces succinct drawings, in that each of the vertex positions in one of our embeddings can be represented using O(log n) bits a…
In this paper we study the area requirements of planar greedy drawings of triconnected planar graphs. Cao, Strelzoff, and Sun exhibited a family $\cal H$ of subdivisions of triconnected plane graphs and claimed that every planar greedy drawing of the graphs in $\mathcal H$ respecting the prescribed plane embedding requires exponential area. However, we show that every $n$-vertex graph in $\cal H$ actually has a planar greedy drawing respecting the prescribed plane embedding on an $O(n)\times O(n)$ grid. This reopens the question whether triconnected planar graphs admit planar greedy drawings o…
An Euclidean greedy embedding of a graph is a straight-line embedding in the plane, such that for every pair of vertices $s$ and $t$, the vertex $s$ has a neighbor $v$ with smaller distance to $t$ than $s$. This drawing style is motivated by greedy geometric routing in wireless sensor networks. A Christmas cactus is a connected graph in which every two simple cycles have at most one vertex in common and in which every cutvertex is part of at most two biconnected blocks. It has been proved that Christmas cactus graphs have an Euclidean greedy embedding. This fact has played a crucial role in pr…
In greedy geometric routing, messages are passed in a network embedded in a metric space according to the greedy strategy of always forwarding messages to nodes that are closer to the destination. We show that greedy geometric routing schemes exist for the Euclidean metric in R^2, for 3-connected planar graphs, with coordinates that can be represented succinctly, that is, with O(log n) bits, where n is the number of vertices in the graph. Moreover, our embedding strategy introduces a coordinate system for R^2 that supports distance comparisons using our succinct coordinates. Thus, our scheme c…
We show that several types of graph drawing in the hyperbolic plane require features of the drawing to be separated from each other by sub-constant distances, distances so small that they can be accurately approximated by Euclidean distance. Therefore, for these types of drawing, hyperbolic geometry provides no benefit over Euclidean graph drawing.
The crossing angle of a straight-line drawing $Γ$ of a graph $G=(V, E)$ is the smallest angle between two crossing edges in $Γ$. Deciding whether a graph $G$ has a straight-line drawing with a crossing angle of $90^\circ$ is $\mathcal NP$-hard. We propose a simple heuristic to compute a drawing with a large crossing angle. The heuristic greedily selects the best position for a single vertex in a random set of points. The algorithm is accompanied by a speed-up technique to compute the crossing angle of a straight-line drawing. We show the effectiveness of the heuristic in an extensive empirical…
We describe an efficient and scalable spherical graph embedding method. The method uses a generalization of the Euclidean stress function for Multi-Dimensional Scaling adapted to spherical space, where geodesic pairwise distances are employed instead of Euclidean distances. The resulting spherical stress function is optimized by means of stochastic gradient descent. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of the proposed method. We also show that some graph families can be embedded with lower distortion on the sphere, than in Euclidean and hyperbo…
$\newcommand{\eps}{\varepsilon}$ In this paper, we consider two important problems defined on finite metric spaces, and provide efficient new algorithms and approximation schemes for these problems on inputs given as graph shortest path metrics or high-dimensional Euclidean metrics. The first of these problems is the greedy permutation (or farthest-first traversal) of a finite metric space: a permutation of the points of the space in which each point is as far as possible from all previous points. We describe randomized algorithms to find $(1+\eps)$-approximate greedy permutations of any graph…
Euclidean spanners are important geometric structures, having found numerous applications over the years. Cornerstone results in this area from the late 80s and early 90s state that for any $d$-dimensional $n$-point Euclidean space, there exists a $(1+ε)$-spanner with $nO(ε^{-d+1})$ edges and lightness $O(ε^{-2d})$. Surprisingly, the fundamental question of whether or not these dependencies on $ε$ and $d$ for small $d$ can be improved has remained elusive, even for $d = 2$. This question naturally arises in any application of Euclidean spanners where precision is a necessity. The state-of-the-…
In this paper we introduce self-approaching graph drawings. A straight-line drawing of a graph is self-approaching if, for any origin vertex s and any destination vertex t, there is an st-path in the graph such that, for any point q on the path, as a point p moves continuously along the path from the origin to q, the Euclidean distance from p to q is always decreasing. This is a more stringent condition than a greedy drawing (where only the distance between vertices on the path and the destination vertex must decrease), and guarantees that the drawing is a 5.33-spanner. We study three topics: …
How Close is a Tree to a Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree?
Charles University（查理大学）；Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）；Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Università degli Studi di Perugia（佩鲁贾大学）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）
A straight-line drawing $Γ$ of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is a drawing of $G$ in the Euclidean plane, where every vertex in $G$ is mapped to a distinct point, and every edge in $G$ is mapped to a straight line segment between their endpoints. A path $P$ in $Γ$ is called increasing-chord if for every four points (not necessarily vertices) $a,b,c,d$ on $P$ in this order, the Euclidean distance between $b,c$ is at most the Euclidean distance between $a,d$. A spanning tree $T$ rooted at some vertex $r$ in $Γ$ is called increasing-chord if $T$ contains an increasing-chord path from $r$ to every vertex in $T…
We study the problem of arranging a set of $n$ disks with prescribed radii on $n$ rays emanating from the origin such that two neighboring rays are separated by an angle of $2π/n$. The center of the disks have to lie on the rays, and no two disk centers are allowed to lie on the same ray. We require that the disks have disjoint interiors, and that for every ray the segment between the origin and the boundary of its associated disk avoids the interior of the disks. Let $\r$ be the sum of the disk radii. We introduce a greedy strategy that constructs such a disk arrangement that can be covered w…
Given a rooted point set $P$, the rooted $y-$Monotone Minimum Spanning Tree (rooted $y-$MMST) of $P$ is the spanning geometric graph of $P$ in which all the vertices are connected to the root by some $y-$monotone path and the sum of the Euclidean lengths of its edges is the minimum. We show that the maximum degree of a rooted $y-$MMST is not bounded by a constant number. We give a linear time algorithm that draws any rooted tree as a rooted $y-$MMST and also show that there exist rooted trees that can be drawn as rooted $y-$MMSTs only in a grid of exponential area.
An $st$-path in a drawing of a graph is self-approaching if during the traversal of the corresponding curve from $s$ to any point $t'$ on the curve the distance to $t'$ is non-increasing. A path has increasing chords if it is self-approaching in both directions. A drawing is self-approaching (increasing-chord) if any pair of vertices is connected by a self-approaching (increasing-chord) path. We study self-approaching and increasing-chord drawings of triangulations and 3-connected planar graphs. We show that in the Euclidean plane, triangulations admit increasing-chord drawings, and for planar…
$t$-spanners are used to approximate the pairwise distances between a set of points in a metric space. They have only a few edges compared to the total number of pairs and they provide a $t$-approximation on the distance of any two arbitrary points. There are many ways to construct such graphs and one of the most efficient ones, in terms of weight and the number of edges of the resulting graph, is the greedy spanner. In this paper, we study the edge crossings of the greedy spanner for points in the Euclidean plane. We prove a constant upper bound for the number of intersections with larger edg…
A greedy embedding of a graph $G = (V,E)$ into a metric space $(X,d)$ is a function $x : V(G) \to X$ such that in the embedding for every pair of non-adjacent vertices $x(s), x(t)$ there exists another vertex $x(u)$ adjacent to $x(s)$ which is closer to $x(t)$ than $x(s)$. This notion of greedy embedding was defined by Papadimitriou and Ratajczak (Theor. Comput. Sci. 2005), where authors conjectured that every 3-connected planar graph has a greedy embedding (possibly planar and convex) in the Euclidean plane. Recently, greedy embedding conjecture has been proved by Leighton and Moitra (FOCS 20…
We show new applications of the nearest-neighbor chain algorithm, a technique that originated in agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We apply it to a diverse class of geometric problems: we construct the greedy multi-fragment tour for Euclidean TSP in $O(n\log n)$ time in any fixed dimension and for Steiner TSP in planar graphs in $O(n\sqrt{n}\log n)$ time; we compute motorcycle graphs (which are a central part in straight skeleton algorithms) in $O(n^{4/3+\varepsilon})$ time for any $\varepsilon>0$; we introduce a narcissistic variant of the $k$-attribute stable matching model, and solve i…
Symmetry is an important aesthetic criteria in graph drawing and network visualisation. Symmetric graph drawings aim to faithfully represent automorphisms of graphs as geometric symmetries in a drawing. In this paper, we design and implement a framework for quality metrics that measure symmetry, that is, how faithfully a drawing of a graph displays automorphisms as geometric symmetries. The quality metrics are based on geometry (i.e. Euclidean distance) as well as mathematical group theory (i.e. orbits of automorphisms). More specifically, we define two varieties of symmetry quality metrics: (…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
We study the problem of $k$-center clustering with outliers in arbitrary metrics and Euclidean space. Though a number of methods have been developed in the past decades, it is still quite challenging to design quality guaranteed algorithm with low complexity for this problem. Our idea is inspired by the greedy method, Gonzalez's algorithm, for solving the problem of ordinary $k$-center clustering. Based on some novel observations, we show that this greedy strategy actually can handle $k$-center clustering with outliers efficiently, in terms of clustering quality and time complexity. We further…
A spanner graph on a set of points in $R^d$ contains a shortest path between any pair of points with length at most a constant factor of their Euclidean distance. In this paper we investigate new models and aim to interpret why good spanners 'emerge' in reality, when they are clearly built in pieces by agents with their own interests and the construction is not coordinated. Our main result is to show that if edges are built in an arbitrary order but an edge is built if and only if its endpoints are not 'close' to the endpoints of an existing edge, the graph is a $(1 + \eps)$-spanner with a lin…
We present the first algorithm to morph graphs on the torus. Given two isotopic essentially 3-connected embeddings of the same graph on the Euclidean flat torus, where the edges in both drawings are geodesics, our algorithm computes a continuous deformation from one drawing to the other, such that all edges are geodesics at all times. Previously even the existence of such a morph was not known. Our algorithm runs in $O(n^{1+ω/2})$ time, where $ω$ is the matrix multiplication exponent, and the computed morph consists of $O(n)$ parallel linear morphing steps. Existing techniques for morphing pla…
We study the problem of embedding graphs in the plane as good geometric spanners. That is, for a graph $G$, the goal is to construct a straight-line drawing $Γ$ of $G$ in the plane such that, for any two vertices $u$ and $v$ of $G$, the ratio between the minimum length of any path from $u$ to $v$ and the Euclidean distance between $u$ and $v$ is small. The maximum such ratio, over all pairs of vertices of $G$, is the spanning ratio of $Γ$. First, we show that deciding whether a graph admits a straight-line drawing with spanning ratio $1$, a proper straight-line drawing with spanning ratio $1$,…
MIT（麻省理工学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Metric Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a classical method for generating meaningful (non-linear) low-dimensional embeddings of high-dimensional data. MDS has a long history in the statistics, machine learning, and graph drawing communities. In particular, the Kamada-Kawai force-directed graph drawing method is equivalent to MDS and is one of the most popular ways in practice to embed graphs into low dimensions. Despite its ubiquity, our theoretical understanding of MDS remains limited as its objective function is highly non-convex. In this paper, we prove that minimizing the Kamada-Kawai obj…
