Constructing Light Spanners Deterministically in Near-Linear Time

Graph spanners are well-studied and widely used both in theory and practice. In a recent breakthrough, Chechik and Wulff-Nilsen [CW18] improved the state-of-the-art for light spanners by constructing a $(2k-1)(1+ε)$-spanner with $O(n^{1+1/k})$ edges and $O_ε(n^{1/k})$ lightness. Soon after, Filtser and Solomon [FS19] showed that the classic greedy spanner construction achieves the same bounds The major drawback of the greedy spanner is its running time of $O(mn^{1+1/k})$ (which is faster than [CW16]). This makes the construction impractical even for graphs of moderate size. Much faster spanner constructions do exist but they only achieve lightness $Ω_ε(kn^{1/k})$, even when randomization is used. The contribution of this paper is deterministic spanner constructions that are fast, and achieve similar bounds as the state-of-the-art slower constructions. Our first result is an $O_ε(n^{2+1/k+ε'})$ time spanner construction which achieves the state-of-the-art bounds. Our second result is an $O_ε(m + n\log n)$ time construction of a spanner with $(2k-1)(1+ε)$ stretch, $O(\log k\cdot n^{1+1/k})$ edges and $O_ε(\log k\cdot n^{1/k})$ lightness. This is an exponential improvement in the dependence on $k$ compared to the previous result with such running time. Finally, for the important special case where $k=\log n$, for every constant $ε>0$, we provide an $O(m+n^{1+ε})$ time construction that produces an $O(\log n)$-spanner with $O(n)$ edges and $O(1)$ lightness which is asymptotically optimal. This is the first known sub-quadratic construction of such a spanner for any $k = ω(1)$. To achieve our constructions, we show a novel deterministic incremental approximate distance oracle, which may be of independent interest.