Sublinear-Space Distance Labeling using Hubs

A distance labeling scheme is an assignment of bit-labels to the vertices of an undirected, unweighted graph such that the distance between any pair of vertices can be decoded solely from their labels. We propose a series of new labeling schemes within the framework of so-called hub labeling (HL, also known as landmark labeling or 2-hop-cover labeling), in which each node $u$ stores its distance to all nodes from an appropriately chosen set of hubs $S(u) \subseteq V$. For a queried pair of nodes $(u,v)$, the length of a shortest $u-v$-path passing through a hub node from $S(u)\cap S(v)$ is then used as an upper bound on the distance between $u$ and $v$. We present a hub labeling which allows us to decode exact distances in sparse graphs using labels of size sublinear in the number of nodes. For graphs with at most $n$ nodes and average degree $\Delta$, the tradeoff between label bit size $L$ and query decoding time $T$ for our approach is given by $L = O(n \log \log\Delta T / \log\Delta T)$, for any $T \leq n$. Our simple approach is thus the first sublinear-space distance labeling for sparse graphs that simultaneously admits small decoding time (for constant $\Delta$, we can achieve any $T=\omega(1)$ while maintaining $L=o(n)$), and it also provides an improvement in terms of label size with respect to previous slower approaches. By using similar techniques, we then present a $2$-additive labeling scheme for general graphs, i.e., one in which the decoder provides a 2-additive-approximation of the distance between any pair of nodes. We achieve almost the same label size-time tradeoff $L = O(n \log² \log T / \log T)$, for any $T \leq n$. To our knowledge, this is the first additive scheme with constant absolute error to use labels of sublinear size. The corresponding decoding time is then small (any $T=\omega(1)$ is sufficient).