distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

and

geometric graph theory Geometric graph theory in the broader sense is a large and amorphous subfield of graph theory, concerned with graphs defined by geometric means. In a stricter sense, geometric graph theory studies combinatorial and geometric properties of geomet ...

, greedy embedding is a process of assigning coordinates to the nodes of a

telecommunications network A telecommunications network is a group of Node (networking), nodes interconnected by telecommunications links that are used to exchange messages between the nodes. The links may use a variety of technologies based on the methodologies of circuit ...

in order to allow greedy

geographic routing Geographic routing (also called georouting or position-based routing) is a routing principle that relies on geographic position information. It is mainly proposed for wireless networks and based on the idea that the source sends a message to the ge ...

to be used to route messages within the network. Although greedy embedding has been proposed for use in

wireless sensor network Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) refer to networks of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors that monitor and record the physical conditions of the environment and forward the collected data to a central location. WSNs can measure environmental ...

s, in which the nodes already have positions in physical space, these existing positions may differ from the positions given to them by greedy embedding, which may in some cases be points in a virtual space of a higher dimension, or in a

non-Euclidean geometry In mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry consists of two geometries based on axioms closely related to those that specify Euclidean geometry. As Euclidean geometry lies at the intersection of metric geometry and affine geometry, non-Euclidean ge ...

. In this sense, greedy embedding may be viewed as a form of

graph drawing Graph drawing is an area of mathematics and computer science combining methods from geometric graph theory and information visualization to derive two-dimensional depictions of graph (discrete mathematics), graphs arising from applications such ...

, in which an abstract graph (the communications network) is embedded into a geometric space. The idea of performing geographic routing using coordinates in a virtual space, instead of using physical coordinates, is due to Rao et al. Subsequent developments have shown that every network has a greedy embedding with succinct vertex coordinates in the

hyperbolic plane In mathematics, hyperbolic geometry (also called Lobachevskian geometry or Bolyai– Lobachevskian geometry) is a non-Euclidean geometry. The parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry is replaced with: :For any given line ''R'' and point ''P' ...

, that certain graphs including the

polyhedral graph In geometric graph theory, a branch of mathematics, a polyhedral graph is the undirected graph formed from the Vertex (geometry), vertices and Edge (geometry), edges of a convex polyhedron. Alternatively, in purely graph-theoretic terms, the polyh ...

s have greedy embeddings in the

Euclidean plane In mathematics, a Euclidean plane is a Euclidean space of Two-dimensional space, dimension two, denoted \textbf^2 or \mathbb^2. It is a geometric space in which two real numbers are required to determine the position (geometry), position of eac ...

, and that unit disk graphs have greedy embeddings in Euclidean spaces of moderate dimensions with low stretch factors.

Definitions

In greedy routing, a message from a source node ''s'' to a destination node ''t'' travels to its destination by a sequence of steps through intermediate nodes, each of which passes the message on to a neighboring node that is closer to ''t''. If the message reaches an intermediate node ''x'' that does not have a neighbor closer to ''t'', then it cannot make progress and the greedy routing process fails. A greedy embedding is an embedding of the given graph with the property that a failure of this type is impossible. Thus, it can be characterized as an embedding of the graph with the property that for every two nodes ''x'' and ''t'', there exists a neighbor ''y'' of ''x'' such that ''d''(''x'',''t'') > ''d''(''y'',''t''), where ''d'' denotes the distance in the embedded space.

Graphs with no greedy embedding

Not every graph has a greedy embedding into the

; a simple counterexample is given by the

star A star is a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by Self-gravitation, self-gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night sk ...

''K''_1,6, a

tree In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, e.g., including only woody plants with secondary growth, only ...

with one internal node and six leaves. Whenever this graph is embedded into the plane, some two of its leaves must form an angle of 60 degrees or less, from which it follows that at least one of these two leaves does not have a neighbor that is closer to the other leaf. In

Euclidean space Euclidean space is the fundamental space of geometry, intended to represent physical space. Originally, in Euclid's ''Elements'', it was the three-dimensional space of Euclidean geometry, but in modern mathematics there are ''Euclidean spaces ...

s of higher dimensions, more graphs may have greedy embeddings; for instance, ''K''_1,6 has a greedy embedding into three-dimensional Euclidean space, in which the internal node of the star is at the origin and the leaves are a unit distance away along each coordinate axis. However, for every Euclidean space of fixed dimension, there are graphs that cannot be embedded greedily: whenever the number ''n'' is greater than the kissing number of the space, the graph ''K''_1,''n'' has no greedy embedding.

Hyperbolic and succinct embeddings

Unlike the case for the Euclidean plane, every network has a greedy embedding into the

. The original proof of this result, by Robert Kleinberg, required the node positions to be specified with high precision, but subsequently it was shown that, by using a heavy path decomposition of a

spanning tree In the mathematical field of graph theory, a spanning tree ''T'' of an undirected graph ''G'' is a subgraph that is a tree which includes all of the vertices of ''G''. In general, a graph may have several spanning trees, but a graph that is no ...

of the network, it is possible to represent each node succinctly, using only a logarithmic number of bits per point. In contrast, there exist graphs that have greedy embeddings in the Euclidean plane, but for which any such embedding requires a polynomial number of bits for the Cartesian coordinates of each point.

Special classes of graphs

Trees

The class of

trees In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, e.g., including only woody plants with secondary growth, only p ...

that admit greedy embeddings into the Euclidean plane has been completely characterized, and a greedy embedding of a tree can be found in

linear time In theoretical computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of computer time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations ...

when it exists. For more general graphs, some greedy embedding algorithms such as the one by Kleinberg start by finding a

of the given graph, and then construct a greedy embedding of the spanning tree. The result is necessarily also a greedy embedding of the whole graph. However, there exist graphs that have a greedy embedding in the Euclidean plane but for which no spanning tree has a greedy embedding.

Planar graphs

conjecture In mathematics, a conjecture is a conclusion or a proposition that is proffered on a tentative basis without proof. Some conjectures, such as the Riemann hypothesis or Fermat's conjecture (now a theorem, proven in 1995 by Andrew Wiles), ha ...

d that every

(a 3-vertex-connected

planar graph In graph theory, a planar graph is a graph (discrete mathematics), graph that can be graph embedding, embedded in the plane (geometry), plane, i.e., it can be drawn on the plane in such a way that its edges intersect only at their endpoints. ...

, or equivalently by

Steinitz's theorem In polyhedral combinatorics, a branch of mathematics, Steinitz's theorem is a characterization of the undirected graphs formed by the edges and vertices of three-dimensional convex polyhedron, convex polyhedra: they are exactly the vertex connect ...

the graph of a

convex polyhedron In geometry, a polyhedron (: polyhedra or polyhedrons; ) is a three-dimensional figure with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. The term "polyhedron" may refer either to a solid figure or to its boundary su ...

) has a greedy embedding into the Euclidean plane. By exploiting the properties of cactus graphs, proved the conjecture; the greedy embeddings of these graphs can be defined succinctly, with logarithmically many bits per coordinate. However, the greedy embeddings constructed according to this proof are not necessarily planar embeddings, as they may include crossings between pairs of edges. For maximal planar graphs, in which every face is a triangle, a greedy planar embedding can be found by applying the

Knaster–Kuratowski–Mazurkiewicz lemma The Knaster–Kuratowski–Mazurkiewicz lemma is a basic result in mathematical fixed-point theory published in 1929 by Knaster, Kuratowski and Mazurkiewicz. The KKM lemma can be proved from Sperner's lemma and can be used to prove the Brouwer ...

to a weighted version of a straight-line embedding algorithm of Schnyder. The strong Papadimitriou–Ratajczak conjecture, that every

has a planar greedy embedding in which all faces are convex, remains unproven..

Unit disk graphs

The wireless sensor networks that are the target of greedy embedding algorithms are frequently modeled as unit disk graphs, graphs in which each node is represented as a

unit disk In mathematics, the open unit disk (or disc) around ''P'' (where ''P'' is a given point in the plane), is the set of points whose distance from ''P'' is less than 1: :D_1(P) = \.\, The closed unit disk around ''P'' is the set of points whose d ...

and each edge corresponds to a pair of disks with nonempty intersection. For this special class of graphs, it is possible to find succinct greedy embeddings into a Euclidean space of polylogarithmic dimension, with the additional property that distances in the graph are accurately approximated by distances in the embedding, so that the paths followed by greedy routing are short.

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