text: Given an undirected @math -node unweighted graph @math , a spanner with stretch function @math is a subgraph @math such that, if two nodes are at distance @math in @math , then they are at distance at most @math in @math . Spanners are very well studied in the literature. The typical goal is to construct the sparsest possible spanner for a given stretch function. In this paper we study pairwise spanners, where we require to approximate the @math - @math distance only for pairs @math in a given set @math . Such @math -spanners were studied before [Coppersmith,Elkin'05] only in the special case that @math is the identity function, i.e. distances between relevant pairs must be preserved exactly (a.k.a. pairwise preservers). Here we present pairwise spanners which are at the same time sparser than the best known preservers (on the same @math ) and of the best known spanners (with the same @math ). In more detail, for arbitrary @math , we show that there exists a @math -spanner of size @math with @math . Alternatively, for any @math , there exists a @math -spanner of size @math with @math . We also consider the relevant special case that there is a critical set of nodes @math , and we wish to approximate either the distances within nodes in @math or from nodes in @math to any other node. We show that there exists an @math -spanner of size @math with @math , and an @math -spanner of size @math with @math . All the mentioned pairwise spanners can be constructed in polynomial time.
  @cite_13: We obtain the following results related to dynamic versions of the shortest-paths problem: (i) Reductions that show that the incremental and decremental single-source shortest-paths problems, for weighted directed or undirected graphs, are, in a strong sense, at least as hard as the static all-pairs shortest-paths problem. We also obtain slightly weaker results for the corresponding unweighted problems. (ii) A randomized fully-dynamic algorithm for the all-pairs shortest-paths problem in directed unweighted graphs with an amortized update time of O(mn) and a worst case query time is O(n 3 4 ). (iii) A deterministic O(n 2 log n) time algorithm for constructing a (log n)-spanner with O(n) edges for any weighted undirected graph on n vertices. The algorithm uses a simple algorithm for incrementally maintaining single-source shortest-paths tree up to a given distance.
  @cite_10: Let G(V, E) be an undirected weighted graph with |V| = n, and |E| = m. A t-spanner of the graph G(V, E) is a sub-graph G(V, ES) such that the distance between any pair of vertices in the spanner is at most t times the distance between the two in the given graph. A 1963 girth conjecture of Erdos implies that Ω(n1+1 k) edges are required in the worst case for any (2k - 1)-spanner, which has been proved for k = 1, 2, 3, 5. There exist polynomial time algorithms that can construct spanners with the size that matches this conjectured lower bound, and the best known algorithm takes O(mn1 k) expected running time. In this paper, we present an extremely simple linear time randomized algorithm that constructs (2k - 1)-spanner of size matching the conjectured lower bound. Our algorithm requires local information for computing a spanner, and thus can be adapted suitably to obtain efficient distributed and parallel algorithms.
  @cite_18: Thorup and Zwick showed that for any integer k≥ 1, it is possible to preprocess any positively weighted undirected graph G=(V,E), with |E|=m and |V|=n, in O(kmn @math ) expected time and construct a data structure (a (2k–1)-approximate distance oracle) of size O(kn @math ) capable of returning in O(k) time an approximation @math of the distance δ(u,v) from u to v in G that satisfies @math , for any two vertices u,v∈ V. They also presented a much slower O(kmn) time deterministic algorithm for constructing approximate distance oracle with the slightly larger size of O(kn @math log n). We present here a deterministic O(kmn @math ) time algorithm for constructing oracles of size O(kn @math ). Our deterministic algorithm is slower than the randomized one by only a logarithmic factor. Using our derandomization technique we also obtain the first deterministic linear time algorithm for constructing optimal spanners of weighted graphs. We do that by derandomizing the O(km) expected time algorithm of Baswana and Sen (ICALP’03) for constructing (2k–1)-spanners of size O(kn @math ) of weighted undirected graphs without incurring any asymptotic loss in the running time or in the size of the spanners produced.
  @cite_1: 
summary: There are several algorithms for computing multiplicative and additive spanners in weighted and unweighted graphs. In unweighted graphs, for any integer @math , Halperin and Zwick @cite_1 gave a linear time algorithm to compute a multiplicative @math -spanner of size @math , where @math is the number of vertices. Note that for @math one obtains a spanner with multiplicative stretch @math and with size @math : we will use this type of spanner in Theorem . Analogous results are also known for weighted graphs @cite_10 @cite_18 @cite_13 .