Rooted Uniform Monotone Minimum Spanning Trees

Abstract: We study the construction of the minimum cost spanning geometric graph of a given rooted point set $P$ where each point of $P$ is connected to the root by a path that satisfies a given property. We focus on two properties, namely the monotonicity w.r.t. a single direction ($y$-monotonicity) and the monotonicity w.r.t. a single pair of orthogonal directions ($xy$-monotonicity). We propose algorithms that compute the rooted $y$-monotone ($xy$-monotone) minimum spanning tree of $P$ in $O(|P|\log^2 |P|)$ (resp. $O(|P|\log^3 |P|)$) time when the direction (resp. pair of orthogonal directions) of monotonicity is given, and in $O(|P|^2\log|P|)$ time when the optimum direction (resp. pair of orthogonal directions) has to be determined. We also give simple algorithms which, given a rooted connected geometric graph, decide if the root is connected to every other vertex by paths that are all monotone w.r.t. the same direction (pair of orthogonal directions).