SOLUTION:
A k-spanner of G, i.e., a spanning subgraph G' of G such that,
for any pair of vertices u and v, the length of the shortest path
between u and v in G' is at most k times the distance between
u and v in G.
MEASURE:
The number of edges in G'.
Good News:
Approximable within
for k=2
[333] and
for
[15].
Bad News:
Not approximable within ,
for some c > 0
[332].
Comment:
In the edge-weighted case, the measure changes to the total weight of
the spanner subgraph. In this case, the problem is still approximable
within
for k=2, but is hard to
approximate within
for any
[332] ()
and [142] ().
The variation in which the goal is to minimize the maximum degree in G' is
approximable within
where
is the
maximum degree in G [336].
See [142] for hardness of several other variants of the
spanner problem.