Modern networking applications replicate data and services widely, leading to a need for location-independent routing---the ability to route queries to objects using names independent of the objects' physical locations. Two important properties of such a routing infrastructure are routing locality and rapid adaptation to arriving and departing nodes. We show how these two properties can be efficiently achieved for certain network topologies. To do this, we present a new distributed algorithm that can solve the nearest-neighbor problem for these networks. We describe our solution in the context of Tapestry, an overlay network infrastructure that employs techniques proposed by Plaxton et al. [24].

We describe several compact routing schemes for general weighted undirected networks. Our schemes are simple and easy to implement. The routing tables stored at the nodes of the network are all very small. The headers attached to the routed messages, including the name of the destination, are extremely short. The routing decision at each node takes constant time. Yet, the stretch of these routing schemes, i.e., the worst ratio between the cost of the path on which a packet is routed and the cost of the cheapest path from source to destination, is a small constant. Our schemes achieve a near-optimal tradeoff between the size of the routing tables used and the resulting stretch. More specifically, we obtain: 1. A routing scheme that uses only ~ O(n 1=2) bits of memory at each node of an n-node network that has stretch 3. The space is optimal, up to logarithmic factors, in the sense that

We present a near linear time algorithm for constructing hierarchical nets in finite metric spaces with constant doubling dimension. This data-structure is then applied to obtain improved algorithms for the following problems: approximate nearest neighbor search, well-separated pair decomposition, spanner construction, compact representation scheme, doubling measure, and computation of the (approximate) Lipschitz constant of a function. In all cases, the running (preprocessing) time is near linear and the space being used is linear. 1

This survey concerns the role of data structures for compactly storing and representing various types of information in a localized and distributed fashion. Traditional approaches to data representation are based on global data structures, which require access to the entire structure even if the sought information involves only a small and local set of entities. In contrast, localized data representation schemes are based on breaking the information into small local pieces, or labels, selected in a way that allows one to infer information regarding a small set of entities directly from their labels, without using any additional (global) information. The survey focuses on combinatorial and algorithmic techniques, and covers complexity results on various applications, including compact localized schemes for message routing in communication networks, and adjacency and distance labeling schemes.

Reachability and distance queries in graphs are fundamental to numerous applications, ranging from geographic navigation systems to Internet routing. Some of these applications involve huge graphs and yet require fast query answering. We propose a new data structure for representing all distances in a graph. The data structure is distributed in the sense that it may be viewed as assigning labels to the vertices, such that a query involving vertices u and v may be answered using only the labels of u and v.

INTRODUCTION An n-point metric space (X; D) can be represented by an n n table specifying the distances. Such tables arise in many diverse areas. For example, consider the following scenario in microbiology: X is a collection of bacterial strains, and for every two strains, one is given their dissimilarity (computed, say, by comparing their DNA). It is dicult to see any structure in a large table of numbers, and so we would like to represent a given metric space in a more comprehensible way. For example, it would be very nice if we could assign to each x 2 X a point f(x) in the plane in such a way that D(x; y) equals the Euclidean distance of f(x) and f(y). Such a representation would allow us to see the structure of the metric space: tight clusters, isolated points, and so on. Another advantage would be that the metric would now be represented by only 2n real numbers, the coordinates of the n points in the plane, instead of numbers as before. Moreover, many quantities concern

We survey recent and not so recent results related to the computation of exact and approximate distances, and corresponding shortest, or almost shortest, paths in graphs. We consider many different settings and models and try to identify some remaining open problems.

Given a weighted undirected network with arbitrary node names, we present a compact routing scheme, using a O(√n) space routing table at each node, and routing along paths of stretch 3, that is, at most thrice as long as the shortest paths. This is optimal in a very strong sense. It is known that no compact routing using o(n) space per node can route with stretch below 3. Also, it is known that any stretch below 5 requires Ω(√n) space per node.

Abstract — The Thorup-Zwick (TZ) compact routing scheme is the first generic stretch-3 routing scheme delivering a nearly optimal per-node memory upper bound. Using both direct analysis and simulation, we derive the stretch distribution of this routing scheme on Internet-like interdomain topologies. By investigating the TZ scheme on random graphs with power-law node degree distributions, Pk � k −γ, we find that the average TZ stretch is quite low and virtually independent of γ. In particular, for the Internet interdomain graph with γ � 2.1, the average TZ stretch is around 1.1, with up to 70 % of all pairwise paths being stretch-1 (shortest possible). As the network grows, the average stretch slowly decreases. The routing table is very small, too. It is well below its upper bounds, and its size is around 50 records for 10 4-node networks. Furthermore, we find that both the average shortest path length (i.e. distance) d and width of the distance distribution σ observed in the real Internet inter-AS graph have values that are very close to the minimums of the average stretch in the d- and σ-directions. This leads us to the discovery of a unique critical point of the average TZ stretch as a function of d and σ. The Internet distance distribution is located in a close neighborhood of this point. This is remarkable given the fact that the Internet interdomain topology has evolved without any direct attention paid to properties of the stretch distribution. It suggests the average stretch function may be an indirect indicator of the optimization criteria influencing the Internet’s interdomain topology evolution.

We investigate the importance of space when solving problems based on graph distance in the streaming model. In this model, the input graph is presented as a stream of edges in an arbitrary order. The main computational restriction of the model is that we have limited space and therefore cannot store all the streamed data; we are forced to make space-efficient summaries of the data as we go along. For a graph of n vertices and m edges, we show that testing many graph properties, including connectivity (ergo any reasonable decision problem about distances) and bipartiteness, requires Ω(n) bits of space. Given this, we then investigate how the power of the model increases as we relax our space restriction. Our main result is an efficient randomized algorithm that constructs a (2t + 1)-spanner in one pass. With high probability, it uses O(t · n 1+1/t log 2 n) bits of space and processes each edge in the stream in O(t 2 · n 1/t log n) time. We find approximations to diameter and girth via the log n constructed spanner. For t = Ω (), the space log log n requirement of the algorithm is O(n·polylog n), and the per-edge processing time is O(polylog n). We also show a corresponding lower bound of t for the approximation ratio achievable when the space restriction is O(t · n1+1/t log 2 n). We then consider the scenario in which we are allowed multiple passes over the input stream. Here, we investigate whether allowing these extra passes will compensate for a given space restriction. We show that ∗This work was supported by the DoD University Research Initiative (URI) administered by the Office of Naval Research