For fixed @math , we consider the task of adding to a graph @math a set of weighted shortcut edges on the same vertex set, such that the length of a shortest @math -hop path between any pair of vertices in the augmented graph is exactly the same as the original distance between these vertices in @math . A set of shortcut edges with this property is called an exact @math -hopset and may be applied in processing distance queries on graph @math . In particular, a @math -hopset directly corresponds to a distributed distance oracle known as a hub labeling. In this work, we explore centralized distance oracles based on @math -hopsets and display their advantages in several practical scenarios. In particular, for graphs of constant highway dimension, and more generally for graphs of constant skeleton dimension, we show that @math -hopsets require exponentially fewer shortcuts per node than any previously described distance oracle while incurring only a quadratic increase in the query decoding time, and actually offer a speedup when compared to simple oracles based on a direct application of @math -hopsets. Finally, we consider the problem of computing minimum-size @math -hopset (for any @math ) for a given graph @math , showing a polylogarithmic-factor approximation for the case of unique shortest path graphs. When @math , for a given bound on the space used by the distance oracle, we provide a construction of hopsets achieving polylog approximation both for space and query time compared to the optimal @math -hopset oracle given the space bound.
In graphs of bounded highway dimension, hub labels were among the first identified distance oracles to provide label size and query time polynomial in the highway dimension and polylogarithmic in other graph parameters @cite_18 . This result was then extended to the more general class of graphs with bounded skeleton dimension @cite_4 .
@cite_18 @cite_4
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Computing driving directions has motivated many shortest path heuristics that answer queries on continental scale networks, with tens of millions of intersections, literally instantly, and with very low storage overhead. In this paper we complement the experimental evidence with the first rigorous proofs of efficiency for many of the heuristics suggested over the past decade. We introduce the notion of highway dimension and show how low highway dimension gives a unified explanation for several seemingly different algorithms. The goal of a hub-based distance labeling scheme for a network G = (V, E) is to assign a small subset S(u) ⊆ V to each node u ∈ V, in such a way that for any pair of nodes u, v, the intersection of hub sets S(u) ∩ S(v) contains a node on the shortest uv-path. The existence of small hub sets, and consequently efficient shortest path processing algorithms, for road networks is an empirical observation. A theoretical explanation for this phenomenon was proposed by (SODA 2010) through a network parameter they called highway dimension, which captures the size of a hitting set for a collection of shortest paths of length at least r intersecting a given ball of radius 2r. In this work, we revisit this explanation, introducing a more tractable (and directly comparable) parameter based solely on the structure of shortest-path spanning trees, which we call skeleton dimension. We show that skeleton dimension admits an intuitive definition for both directed and undirected graphs, provides a way of computing labels more efficiently than by using highway dimension, and leads to comparable or stronger theoretical bounds on hub set size.