We study a family of closely-related distributed graph problems, which we call degree splitting, where roughly speaking the objective is to partition (or orient) the edges such that each node's degree is split almost uniformly. Our findings lead to answers for a number of problems, a sampling of which includes: -- We present a @math round deterministic algorithm for @math -edge-coloring, where @math denotes the maximum degree. Modulo the @math factor, this settles one of the long-standing open problems of the area from the 1990's (see e.g. Panconesi and Srinivasan [PODC'92]). Indeed, a weaker requirement of @math -edge-coloring in @math rounds was asked for in the 4th open question in the Distributed Graph Coloring book by Barenboim and Elkin. -- We show that sinkless orientation---i.e., orienting edges such that each node has at least one outgoing edge---on @math -regular graphs can be solved in @math rounds randomized and in @math rounds deterministically. These prove the corresponding lower bounds by [STOC'16] and Chang, Kopelowitz, and Pettie [FOCS'16] to be tight. Moreover, these show that sinkless orientation exhibits an exponential separation between its randomized and deterministic complexities, akin to the results of for @math -coloring @math -regular trees. -- We present a randomized @math round algorithm for orienting @math -arboricity graphs with maximum out-degree @math . This can be also turned into a decomposition into @math forests when @math and into @math pseduo-forests when @math . Obtaining an efficient distributed decomposition into less than @math forests was stated as the 10th open problem in the book by Barenboim and Elkin.
See thm:directedDegreeSplit and lem:forestDecomp for the formal statements. We note that efficient distributed orientation with out-degree less than @math had remained open. The best previously known results were as follows: an orientation with out-degree at most @math in @math rounds and an orientation with out-degree at most @math in @math rounds, both due to Barenboim and Elkin @cite_23 . The same authors state the closely-related problem of efficient distributed decomposition into less than @math forests as the 10th open problem in their book [Section 11] barenboim2013monograph .
@cite_23
1987125980
We study the distributed maximal independent set (henceforth, MIS) problem on sparse graphs. Currently, there are known algorithms with a sublogarithmic running time for this problem on oriented trees and graphs of bounded degrees. We devise the first sublogarithmic algorithm for computing MIS on graphs of bounded arboricity. This is a large family of graphs that includes graphs of bounded degree, planar graphs, graphs of bounded genus, graphs of bounded treewidth, graphs that exclude a fixed minor, and many other graphs. We also devise efficient algorithms for coloring graphs from these families. These results are achieved by the following technique that may be of independent interest. Our algorithm starts with computing a certain graph-theoretic structure, called Nash-Williams forests-decomposition. Then this structure is used to compute the MIS or coloring. Our results demonstrate that this methodology is very powerful. Finally, we show nearly-tight lower bounds on the running time of any distributed algorithm for computing a forests-decomposition.