Dual Failure Resilient BFS Structure

Abstract

We study {\em breadth-first search (BFS)} spanning trees, and address the problem of designing a sparse {\em fault-tolerant} BFS structure, or {\em FT-BFS } for short, resilient to the failure of up to two edges in the given undirected unweighted graph $G$, i.e., a sparse subgraph $H$ of $G$ such that subsequent to the failure of up to two edges, the surviving part $H'$ of $H$ still contains a BFS spanning tree for (the surviving part of) $G$. FT-BFS structures, as well as the related notion of replacement paths, have been studied so far for the restricted case of a single failure. It has been noted widely that when concerning shortest-paths in a variety of contexts, there is a sharp qualitative difference between a single failure and two or more failures. Our main results are as follows. We present an algorithm that for every $n$-vertex unweighted undirected graph $G$ and source node $s$ constructs a (two edge failure) FT-BFS structure rooted at $s$ with $O(n^{5/3})$ edges. To provide a useful theory of shortest paths avoiding 2 edges failures, we take a principled approach to classifying the arrangement these paths. We believe that the structural analysis provided in this paper may decrease the barrier for understanding the general case of $f\geq 2$ faults and pave the way to the future design of $f$-fault resilient structures for $f \geq 2$. We also provide a matching lower bound, which in fact holds for the general case of $f \geq 1$ and multiple sources $S \subseteq V$. It shows that for every $f\geq 1$, and integer $1 \leq \sigma \leq n$, there exist $n$-vertex graphs with a source set $S \subseteq V$ of cardinality $\sigma$ for which any FT-BFS structure rooted at each $s \in S$, resilient to up to $f$-edge faults has $\Omega(\sigma^{1/(f+1)} \cdot n^{2-1/(f+1)})$ edges.