Local Routing in a Tree Metric 1-Spanner

Abstract: Solomon and Elkin constructed a shortcutting scheme for weighted trees which results in a 1-spanner for the tree metric induced by the input tree. The spanner has logarithmic lightness, logarithmic diameter, a linear number of edges and bounded degree (provided the input tree has bounded degree). This spanner has been applied in a series of papers devoted to designing bounded degree, low-diameter, low-weight $(1+\epsilon)$-spanners in Euclidean and doubling metrics. In this paper, we present a simple local routing algorithm for this tree metric spanner. The algorithm has a routing ratio of 1, is guaranteed to terminate after $O(\log n)$ hops and requires $O(\Delta \log n)$ bits of storage per vertex where $\Delta$ is the maximum degree of the tree on which the spanner is constructed. This local routing algorithm can be adapted to a local routing algorithm for a doubling metric spanner which makes use of the shortcutting scheme.