Light Spanners with Small Hop-Diameter

Lightness, sparsity, and hop-diameter are the fundamental parameters of geometric spanners. Arya et al. [STOC’95] showed in their seminal work that there exists a construction of Euclidean (1 + ε)spanners with hop-diameter O(log n) and lightness O(log n). They also gave a general tradeoff of hop-diameter k and sparsity O(α_k(n)), where α_k is a very slowly growing inverse of an Ackermann-style function. The former combination of logarithmic hop-diameter and lightness is optimal due to the lower bound by Dinitz et al. [FOCS’08]. Later, Elkin and Solomon [STOC’13] generalized the light spanner construction to doubling metrics and extended the tradeoff for more values of hop-diameter k. In a recent line of work [SoCG’22, SoCG’23], Le et al. proved that the aforementioned tradeoff between the hop-diameter and sparsity is tight for every choice of hop-diameter k. A fundamental question remains: What is the optimal tradeoff between the hop-diameter and lightness for every value of k? In this paper, we present a general framework for constructing light spanners with small hop-diameter. Our framework is based on tree covers. In particular, we show that if a metric admits a tree cover with γ trees, stretch t, and lightness L, then it also admits a t-spanner with hop-diameter k and lightness O(kn^2/k · γL). Further, we note that the tradeoff for trees is tight due to a construction in uniform line metric, which is perhaps the simplest tree metric. As a direct consequence of this framework, we obtain new tradeoffs between lightness and hop-diameter for doubling metrics.