NP-completeness results for minimum planar spanners

Abstract

For any fixed parameter t ≥ 1, a t-spanner of a graph G is a spanning subgraph in which the distance between every pair of vertices is at most t times their distance in G. A minimum t-spanner is a t-spanner with minimum total edge weight or, in unweighted graphs, minimum number of edges. In this paper, we prove the NP-hardness of finding minimum t-spanners for planar weighted graphs and digraphs if t ≥ 3, and for planar unweighted graphs and digraphs if t ≥ 5. We thus extend results on that problem to the interesting case where the instances are known to be planar. We also introduce the related problem of finding minimum planar t-spanners and establish its NP-hardness for similar fixed values of t.