text: Dynamic connectivity is a well-studied problem, but so far the most compelling progress has been confined to the edge-update model: maintain an understanding of connectivity in an undirected graph, subject to edge insertions and deletions. In this paper, we study two more challenging, yet equally fundamental problems. Subgraph connectivity asks to maintain an understanding of connectivity under vertex updates: updates can turn vertices on and off, and queries refer to the subgraph induced by "on" vertices. (For instance, this is closer to applications in networks of routers, where node faults may occur.) We describe a data structure supporting vertex updates in O (m^ 2 3 ) amortized time, where m denotes the number of edges in the graph. This greatly improves over the previous result [Chan, STOC'02], which required fast matrix multiplication and had an update time of O(m^0.94). The new data structure is also simpler. Geometric connectivity asks to maintain a dynamic set of n geometric objects, and query connectivity in their intersection graph. (For instance, the intersection graph of balls describes connectivity in a network of sensors with bounded transmission radius.) Previously, nontrivial fully dynamic results were known only for special cases like axis-parallel line segments and rectangles. We provide similarly improved update times, O (n^ 2 3 ), for these special cases. Moreover, we show how to obtain sublinear update bounds for virtually all families of geometric objects which allow sublinear-time range queries, such as arbitrary 2D line segments, d-dimensional simplices, and d-dimensional balls.
  @cite_32: (MATH) Inspired by dynamic connectivity applications in computational geometry, we consider a problem we call dynamic subgraph connectivity: design a data structure for an undirected graph @math and a subset of vertices @math , to support insertions and deletions in @math and connectivity queries (are two vertices connected @?) in the subgraph induced by @math . We develop the first sublinear, fully dynamic method for this problem for general sparse graphs, using an elegant combination of several simple ideas. Our method requires linear space, @math amortized update time, and @math query time, where @math is the matrix multiplication exponent and @math hides polylogarithmic factors.
summary: It was shown @cite_32 that subgraph connectivity can be reduced to dynamic connectivity of axis-parallel line segments in 3 dimensions. Thus, as soon as one gets enough combinatorial richness in the host geometric space, subgraph connectivity becomes the possible way to solve geometric connectivity.