English

Breaking the Sorting Barrier for Directed Single-Source Shortest Paths

Data Structures and Algorithms 2025-07-31 v2

Abstract

We give a deterministic O(mlog2/3n)O(m\log^{2/3}n)-time algorithm for single-source shortest paths (SSSP) on directed graphs with real non-negative edge weights in the comparison-addition model. This is the first result to break the O(m+nlogn)O(m+n\log n) time bound of Dijkstra's algorithm on sparse graphs, showing that Dijkstra's algorithm is not optimal for SSSP.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.17033,
  title  = {Breaking the Sorting Barrier for Directed Single-Source Shortest Paths},
  author = {Ran Duan and Jiayi Mao and Xiao Mao and Xinkai Shu and Longhui Yin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.17033},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

17 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:09:02.791Z