*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Title: Competitive Routing on a Variant of the Delaunay Triangulation
Abstract: A subgraph H of a weighted graph G is a t-spanner of G provided that for every edge xy in G, the weight of the shortest path between x and y in H is at most t times the weight of xy. It is known that the Delaunay triangulation of a point set P (where the empty region is an equilateral triangle) is a 2-spanner of the complete Euclidean graph. We present a new and simple proof of this spanning ratio that allows us to route competitively on this graph. Specifically, we present a deterministic local routing scheme that is guaranteed to find a short path between any pair of vertices in this Delaunay triangulation. We guarantee that the length of the path is at most 5/sqrt(3) times the Euclidean distance between the pair of vertices. Moreover, we show that no local routing scheme can achieve a better competitive spanning ratio thereby implying that our routing scheme is optimal. This is somewhat surprising since the spanning ratio is 2.