Low diameter graph decompositions

Adecomposition of a graphG=(V,E) is a partition of the vertex set into subsets (calledblocks). Thediameter of a decomposition is the leastd such that any two vertices belonging to the same connected component of a block are at distance d. In this paper we prove (nearly best possible) statements, of the form: Anyn-vertex graph has a decomposition into a small number of blocks each having small diameter. Such decompositions provide a tool for efficiently decentralizing distributed computations. In 4] it was shown that every graph has a decomposition into at mosts(n) blocks of diameter at mosts(n) for . Using a technique of Awerbuch 3] and Awerbuch and Peleg 5], we improve this result by showing that every graph has a decomposition of diameterO (logn) intoO(logn) blocks. In addition, we give a randomized distributed algorithm that produces such a decomposition and runs in timeO(log² n). The construction can be parameterized to provide decompositions that trade-off between the number of blocks and the diameter. We show that this trade-off is nearly best possible, for two families of graphs: the first consists of skeletons of certain triangulations of a simplex and the second consists of grid graphs with added diagonals. The proofs in both cases rely on basic results in combinatorial topology, Sperner's lemma for the first class and Tucker's lemma for the second.A preliminary version of this paper appeared as Decomposing Graphs into Regions of Small Diameter in Proc. 2nd ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (1991) 321-330.This work was supported in part by NSF grant DMS87-03541 and by a grant from the Israel Academy of Science.This work was supported in part by NSF grant DMS87-03541 and CCR89-11388.