Fast Geographic Routing in Fixed-Growth Graphs (2502.03663v2)

Abstract: In the 1960s, the social scientist Stanley Milgram performed his famous "small-world" experiments where he found that people in the US who are far apart geographically are nevertheless connected by remarkably short chains of acquaintances. Since then, there has been considerable work to design networks that accurately model the phenomenon that Milgram observed. One well-known approach was Barab{\'a}si and Albert's preferential attachment model, which has small diameter yet lacks an algorithm that can efficiently find those short connections between nodes. Jon Kleinberg, in contrast, proposed a small-world graph formed from an $n \times n$ lattice that guarantees that greedy routing can navigate between any two nodes in $\mathcal{O}(\log^2 n)$ time with high probability. Further work by Goodrich and Ozel and by Gila, Goodrich, and Ozel present a hybrid technique that combines elements from these previous approaches to improve greedy routing time to $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ hops. These are important theoretical results, but we believe that their reliance on the square lattice limits their application in the real world. In this work, we generalize the model of Gila, Ozel, and Goodrich to any class of what we call fixed-growth graphs of dimensionality $\alpha$, a subset of bounded-growth graphs introduced in several prior papers. We prove tight bounds for greedy routing and diameter in these graphs, both in expectation and with high probability. We then apply our model to the U.S. road network to show that by modeling the network as a fixed-growth graph rather than as a lattice, we are able to improve greedy routing performance over all 50 states. We also show empirically that the optimal clustering exponent for the U.S. road network is much better modeled by the dimensionality of the network $\alpha$ than by the network's size, as was conjectured in a previous work.