The notion of treewidth has seen to be a powerful vehicle for many graph algorithmic studies. This survey paper wants to give an overview of many classes of graphs that can be seen to have a uniform upper bound on the treewidth of graphs in the class. Also, some mutual relations between such classes are discussed.

Spectral partitioning methods use the Fiedler vector---the eigenvector of the secondsmallest eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix---to find a small separator of a graph. These methods are important components of many scientific numerical algorithms and have been demonstrated by experiment to work extremely well. In this paper, we show that spectral partitioning methods work well on bounded-degree planar graphs and finite element meshes--- the classes of graphs to which they are usually applied. While naive spectral bisection does not necessarily work, we prove that spectral partitioning techniques can be used to produce separators whose ratio of vertices removed to edges cut is O( p n) for bounded-degree planar graphs and two-dimensional meshes and O i n 1=d j for well-shaped d-dimensional meshes. The heart of our analysis is an upper bound on the second-smallest eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrices of these graphs. 1. Introduction Spectral partitioning has become one of the mos...

We consider the problem of labeling the nodes of a graph in a way that will allow one to compute the distance between any two nodes directly from their labels (without using any additional information). Our main interest is in the minimal length of labels needed in different cases. We obtain upper and lower bounds for several interesting families of graphs. In particular, our main results are the following. For general graphs, we show that the length needed is (n). For trees, we show that the length needed is (log 2 n). For planar graphs, we show an upper bound of O( p n log n) and a lower bound of n 1=3 ). For bounded degree graphs, we show a lower bound of p n). The upper bounds for planar graphs and for trees follow by a more general upper bound for graphs with a r(n)-separator. The two lower bounds, however, are obtained by two different arguments that may be interesting in their own right. We also show some lower bounds on the length of the labels, even if it is only...

We investigate a method of dividing an irregular mesh into equal-sized pieces with few interconnecting edges. The method’s novel feature is that it exploits the geometric coordinates of the mesh vertices. It is based on theoretical work of Miller, Teng, Thurston, and Vavasis, who showed that certain classes of “well-shaped” finite element meshes have good separators. The geometric method is quite simple to implement: we describe a Matlab code for it in some detail. The method is also quite efficient and effective: we compare it with some other methods, including spectral bisection.

Let G be an n-vertex graph with nonnegative weights whose sum is 1 assigned to its vertices, and with no minor isomorphic to a given h-vertex graph H. We prove that there is a set X of no more than h 3/2 n 1/2 vertices of G whose deletion creates a graph in which the total weight of every connected component is at most 1/2. This extends significantly a well-known theorem of Lipton and Tarjan for planar graphs. We exhibit an algorithm which finds, given an n-vertex graph G with weights as above and an h-vertex graph H, either such a set X or a minor of G isomorphic to H. The algorithm runs in time O(h 1/2 n 1/2 m), where m is the number of edges of G plus the number of its vertices. Our results supply extensions of the many known applications of the Lipton-Tarjan separator theorem from the class of planar graphs (or that of graphs with bounded genus) to any class of graphs with an excluded minor. For example, it follows that for any fixed graph H, given a graph G with n vertices and with no H-minor one can approximate the size of the maximum independent set of G up to a relative error of 1 / √ log n in polynomial time, find that size exactly and find the chromatic number of G in time 2 O( √ n) and solve any sparse system of n linear equations in n unknowns whose sparsity structure 0 corresponds to G in time O(n 3/2). We also describe a combinatorial application of our result which relates the tree-width of a graph to the maximum size of a Kh-minor in it.

. The most commonly used p-way partitioning method is recursive bisection (RB). It first divides a graph or a mesh into two equal sized pieces, by a "good" bisection algorithm, and then recursively divides the two pieces. Ideally, we would like to use an optimal bisection algorithm. Because the optimal bisection problem, that partitions a graph into two equal sized subgraphs to minimize the number of edges cut, is NP-complete, practical RB algorithms use more efficient heuristics in place of an optimal bisection algorithm. Most such heuristics are designed to find the best possible bisection within allowed time. We show that the recursive bisection method, even when an optimal bisection algorithm is assumed, may produce a p-way partition that is very far way from the optimal one. Our negative result is complemented by two positive ones: First we show that for some important classes of graphs that occur in practical applications, such as well-shaped finite element and finite difference...

Abstract. A collection of n balls in d dimensions forms a k-ply system if no point in the space is covered by more than k balls. We show that for every k-ply system �, there is a sphere S that intersects at most O(k 1/d n 1�1/d) balls of � and divides the remainder of � into two parts: those in the interior and those in the exterior of the sphere S, respectively, so that the larger part contains at most (1 � 1/(d � 2))n balls. This bound of O(k 1/d n 1�1/d) is the best possible in both n and k. We also present a simple randomized algorithm to find such a sphere in O(n) time. Our result implies that every k-nearest neighbor graphs of n points in d dimensions has a separator of size O(k 1/d n 1�1/d). In conjunction with a result of Koebe that every triangulated planar graph is isomorphic to the intersection graph of a disk-packing, our result not only gives a new geometric proof of the planar separator theorem of Lipton and Tarjan, but also generalizes it to higher dimensions. The separator algorithm can be used for point location and geometric divide and conquer in a fixed dimensional space.

Abstract We describe simple greedy algorithms to construct the shortest set of loops that generates either the fundamental group (with a given basepoint) or the first homology group (over any fixed coefficient field) of any oriented 2-manifold. In particular, we show that the shortest set of loops that generate the fundamental group of any oriented combinatorial 2-manifold, with any given basepoint, can be constructed in O(n log n) time using a straightforward application of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. This solves an open problem of Colin de Verdi`ere and Lazarus.

Hierarchies arise in the context of access control whenever the user population can be modeled as a set of partially ordered classes (represented as a directed graph). A user with access privileges for a class obtains access to objects stored at that class and all descendant classes in the hierarchy. The problem of key management for such hierarchies then consists of assigning a key to each class in the hierarchy so that keys for descendant classes can be obtained via efficient key derivation. We propose a solution to this problem with the following properties: (1) the space complexity of the public information is the same as that of storing the hierarchy; (2) the private information at a class consists of a single key associated with that class; (3) updates (i.e., revocations and additions) are handled locally in the hierarchy; (4) the scheme is provably secure against collusion; and (5) each node can derive the key of any of its descendant with a number of symmetric-key operations bounded by the length of the path between the nodes. Whereas many previous schemes had some of these properties, ours is the first that satisfies all of them. The security of our scheme is based on pseudorandom functions, without reliance on the Random Oracle Model. 18 Portions of this work were supported by Grants IIS-0325345 and CNS-06274488 from the

In this paper we introduce the notion of the limited-depth minor exclusion and show that graphs that exclude small limited-depth minors have relatively small separators. In particular, we prove that for any graph that excludes K h as a depth l minor, we can find a separator of size O(lh 2 log n n=l). This, in turn, implies that any graph that excludes K h as a minor has an O(h p n log n)-sized separator, improving the result of Alon, Seymour, and Thomas for the case where h AE p log n. We show that the d-dimensional simplicial graphs with constant aspect ratio, defined by Miller and Thurston, exclude K h minors of depth L for h = \Omega\Gamma L d\Gamma1 ) when d is a constant. These graphs arise in finite element computations. Our proof of separator existence is constructive and gives an algorithm to find the t-cut-covers decomposition, introduced by Kaklamanis, Krizanc, and Rao, in graphs that exclude small depth minors. This has two interesting implications. F...