Diameter, radius and all eccentricities in linear time for constant-dimension median graphs

Abstract

Median graphs form the class of graphs which is the most studied in metric graph theory. Recently, B\'en\'eteau et al. [2019] designed a linear-time algorithm computing both the $\Theta$-classes and the median set of median graphs. A natural question emerges: is there a linear-time algorithm computing the diameter and the radius for median graphs? We answer positively to this question for median graphs $G$ with constant dimension $d$, i.e. the dimension of the largest induced hypercube of $G$. We propose a combinatorial algorithm computing all eccentricities of median graphs with running time $O(2^{O(d\log d)}n)$. As a consequence, this provides us with a linear-time algorithm determining both the diameter and the radius of median graphs with $d = O(1)$, such as cube-free median graphs. As the hypercube of dimension 4 is not planar, it shows also that all eccentricities of planar median graphs can be computed in $O(n)$.