Õptimal Dual Vertex Failure Connectivity Labels

In this paper we present succinct labeling schemes for supporting connectivity queries under vertex faults. For a given $n$-vertex graph $G$, an $f$-VFT (resp., EFT) connectivity labeling scheme is a distributed data structure that assigns each of the graph edges and vertices a short label, such that given the labels of a vertex pair $u$ and $v$, and the labels of at most $f$ failing vertices (resp., edges) $F$, one can determine if $u$ and $v$ are connected in $G \setminus F$. The primary complexity measure is the length of the individual labels. Since their introduction by [Courcelle, Twigg, STACS '07], FT labeling schemes have been devised only for a limited collection of graph families. A recent work [Dory and Parter, PODC 2021] provided EFT labeling schemes for general graphs under edge failures, leaving the vertex failure case fairly open. We provide the first sublinear $f$-VFT labeling schemes for $f \geq 2$ for any $n$-vertex graph. Our key result is $2$-VFT connectivity labels with $O(\log^3 n)$ bits. Our constructions are based on analyzing the structure of dual failure replacement paths on top of the well-known heavy-light tree decomposition technique of [Sleator and Tarjan, STOC 1981]. We also provide $f$-VFT labels with sub-linear length (in $|V|$) for any $f=o(\log\log n)$, that are based on a reduction to the existing EFT labels.