Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction Abstract and 1. Introduction 1.1 Our Contribution 1.1 Our Contribution 1.2 Setting 1.2 Setting 1.3 The algorithm 1.3 The algorithm Related Work Algorithm 3.1 The Structural Decomposition Phase 3.2 The Routing Phase 3.3 Variants of WormHole Theoretical Analysis 4.1 Preliminaries 4.2 Sublinearity of Inner Ring 4.3 Approximation Error 4.4 Query Complexity Experimental Results 5.1 WormHole𝐸, WormHole𝐻 and BiBFS 5.2 Comparison with index-based methods 5.3 WormHole as a primitive: WormHole𝑀 Related Work Related Work Related Work Algorithm 3.1 The Structural Decomposition Phase 3.2 The Routing Phase 3.3 Variants of WormHole Algorithm 3.1 The Structural Decomposition Phase 3.1 The Structural Decomposition Phase 3.2 The Routing Phase 3.2 The Routing Phase 3.3 Variants of WormHole 3.3 Variants of WormHole Theoretical Analysis 4.1 Preliminaries 4.2 Sublinearity of Inner Ring 4.3 Approximation Error 4.4 Query Complexity Theoretical Analysis 4.1 Preliminaries 4.1 Preliminaries 4.2 Sublinearity of Inner Ring 4.2 Sublinearity of Inner Ring 4.3 Approximation Error 4.3 Approximation Error 4.4 Query Complexity 4.4 Query Complexity Experimental Results 5.1 WormHole𝐸, WormHole𝐻 and BiBFS 5.2 Comparison with index-based methods 5.3 WormHole as a primitive: WormHole𝑀 Experimental Results Experimental Results 5.1 WormHole𝐸, WormHole𝐻 and BiBFS 5.1 WormHole𝐸, WormHole𝐻 and BiBFS 5.2 Comparison with index-based methods 5.2 Comparison with index-based methods 5.3 WormHole as a primitive: WormHole𝑀 5.3 WormHole as a primitive: WormHole𝑀 References References 3 ALGORITHM WormHole utilizes insights about the structure of real world networks to cleverly decompose the graph and calculate approximate shortest paths. We discuss the algorithm and various steps in detail in this section; our two main components are a sublinear decomposition procedure, adapted from the recent work of Ben-Eliezer et al [10], and a routing algorithm that takes advantage of this decomposition to find highly accurate approximate shortest paths. 3.1 The Structural Decomposition Phase We emphasize that the decomposition is performed only once, and all subsequent operations are done using this precomputed decomposition. the decomposition is performed only once 3.2 The Routing Phase The approach is simple: assume the preprocessing phase acquires the inner ring. Upon an inquiry (𝑠,𝑡), the algorithm starts two BFS trees from both 𝑠 and 𝑡. It then expands the tree at each step till one of the followings happens: (1) the two trees intersect, or (2) the trees reach the outer ring. If the search trees in the former do not intersect, WormHole mandatorily routes shortest paths through the inner ring. Once in the inner ring, it computes the exact shortest path through it. 3.3 Variants of WormHole In the default variant of Algorithm 2, WormHole𝐸, we use the bidirectional breadth-first BiBFS shortest path algorithm as a primitive in order to compute the shortest path between two inner ring vertices; see [46] for a full description of BiBFS. The theoretical analysis in §4 considers this variant. In WormHole𝑀 we combine WormHole with an index-based algorithm restricted to the core. While indexing-based algorithms are quite expensive, in terms of both preprocessing and space cost, they lead to much lower times per inquiry. Therefore this variant is suitable when faster inquiry times are preferable to low space requirements. WormHole𝑀 makes the index creation cost substantially lower(compared to generating it for the entire graph) while providing speedups for answering shortest path inquiries compared to the BiBFS implementation. We discuss this briefly in §5.3 but leave a complete systematic exploration of these options for future research. Authors: (1) Talya Eden, Bar-Ilan University (talyaa01@gmail.com); (2) Omri Ben-Eliezer, MIT (omrib@mit.edu); (3) C. Seshadhri, UC Santa Cruz (sesh@ucsc.edu). Authors: Authors: (1) Talya Eden, Bar-Ilan University (talyaa01@gmail.com); (2) Omri Ben-Eliezer, MIT (omrib@mit.edu); (3) C. Seshadhri, UC Santa Cruz (sesh@ucsc.edu). This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 license. available on arxiv available on arxiv