We study the problem of computing geometric spanners for (additively) weighted point sets. A weighted point set is a set of pairs @math where @math is a point in the plane and @math is a real number. The distance between two points @math and @math is defined as @math . We show that in the case where all @math are positive numbers and @math for all @math (in which case the points can be seen as non-intersecting disks in the plane), a variant of the Yao graph is a @math -spanner that has a linear number of edges. We also show that the Additively Weighted Delaunay graph (the face-dual of the Additively Weighted Voronoi diagram) has constant spanning ratio. The straight line embedding of the Additively Weighted Delaunay graph may not be a plane graph. We show how to compute a plane embedding that also has a constant spanning ratio.
Given a graphG, a subgraphG' is at-spanner ofG if, for everyu,v ?V, the distance fromu tov inG' is at mostt times longer than the distance inG. In this paper we give a simple algorithm for constructing sparse spanners for arbitrary weighted graphs. We then apply this algorithm to obtain specific results for planar graphs and Euclidean graphs. We discuss the optimality of our results and present several nearly matching lower bounds. Given a connected geometric graph G, we consider the problem of constructing a t-spanner of G having the minimum number of edges. We prove that for every t with @math , there exists a connected geometric graph G with n vertices, such that every t-spanner of G contains Ω( n1+1 t ) edges. This bound almost matches the known upper bound, which states that every connected weighted graph with n vertices contains a t-spanner with O(tn1+2 (t+1)) edges. We also prove that the problem of deciding whether a given geometric graph contains a t-spanner with at most K edges is NP-hard. Previously, this NP-hardness result was only known for non-geometric graphs