Distance Labeling for Families of Cycles

For an arbitrary finite family of graphs, the distance labeling problem asks to assign labels to all nodes of every graph in the family in a way that allows one to recover the distance between any two nodes of any graph from their labels. The main goal is to minimize the number of unique labels used. We study this problem for the families $\mathcal{C}_n$ consisting of cycles of all lengths between 3 and $n$. We observe that the exact solution for directed cycles is straightforward and focus on the undirected case. We design a labeling scheme requiring $\frac{n\sqrt{n}}{\sqrt{6}}+O(n)$ labels, which is almost twice less than is required by the earlier known scheme. Using the computer search, we find an optimal labeling for each $n\le 17$, showing that our scheme gives the results that are very close to the optimum.