journal article Feb 10, 2025

An Experimental Comparison of Tree-data Structures for Connectivity Queries on Fully-dynamic Undirected Graphs

Abstract
During the past decades significant efforts have been made to propose data structures for answering connectivity queries on fully dynamic graphs, i.e., graphs with frequent insertions and deletions of edges. However, a comprehensive understanding of how these data structures perform in practice is missing, since not all of them have been implemented, let alone evaluated experimentally. We provide reference implementations for the proposed data structures and experimentally evaluate them on a wide range of graphs. Our findings show that the current solutions are not ready to be deployed in systems as is, as every data structure has critical weaknesses when used in practice. Key limitations that must be overcome are the space and time overhead incurred by balanced data structures, the degeneration of the runtime of space-efficient data structures in worst case scenarios, and the maintenance costs for balanced data structures. We detail our findings in the experimental evaluation and provide recommendations for implementing robust solutions for answering connectivity queries on dynamic graphs.
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Details
Published
Feb 10, 2025
Vol/Issue
3(1)
Pages
1-26
License
View
Funding
University of Zurich, CanDoc Grant Award: FK-23-021
Cite This Article
Qing Chen, Michael H. Böhlen, Sven Helmer (2025). An Experimental Comparison of Tree-data Structures for Connectivity Queries on Fully-dynamic Undirected Graphs. Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data, 3(1), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3709660