DILATION-OPTIMAL EDGE DELETION IN POLYGONAL CYCLES.

Consider a geometric network G in the plane. The dilation between any two vertices x and y in G is the ratio of the shortest path distance between x and y in G to the Euclidean distance between them. The maximum dilation over all pairs of vertices in G is called the dilation of G. In this paper, a randomized algorithm is presented which, when given a polygonal cycle C on n vertices in the plane, computes in O(n log³ n) expected time, the edge of C whose removal results in a polygonal path of smallest possible dilation. It is also shown that the edge whose removal gives a polygonal path of largest possible dilation can be computed in O(n log n) time. If C is a convex polygon, the running time for the latter problem becomes O(n). Finally, it is shown that a (1 - ϵ)-approximation to the dilation of every path C \{e}, for all edges e of C, can be computed in O(n log n) total time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]