New Extremal bounds for Reachability and Strong-Connectivity Preservers under failures

In this paper, we consider the question of computing sparse subgraphs for any input directed graph $G=(V,E)$ on $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, that preserves reachability and/or strong connectivity structures. We show $O(n+\min\{|{\cal P}|\sqrt{n},n\sqrt{|{\cal P}|}\})$ bound on a subgraph that is an $1$-fault-tolerant reachability preserver for a given vertex-pair set ${\cal P}\subseteq V\times V$, i.e., it preserves reachability between any pair of vertices in ${\cal P}$ under single edge (or vertex) failure. Our result is a significant improvement over the previous best $O(n |{\cal P}|)$ bound obtained as a corollary of single-source reachability preserver construction. We prove our upper bound by exploiting the special structure of single fault-tolerant reachability preserver for any pair, and then considering the interaction among such structures for different pairs. In the lower bound side, we show that a 2-fault-tolerant reachability preserver for a vertex-pair set ${\cal P}\subseteq V\times V$ of size $\Omega(n^\epsilon)$, for even any arbitrarily small $\epsilon$, requires at least $\Omega(n^{1+\epsilon/8})$ edges. This refutes the existence of linear-sized dual fault-tolerant preservers for reachability for any polynomial sized vertex-pair set. We also present the first sub-quadratic bound of at most $\tilde{O}(k 2^k n^{2-1/k})$ size, for strong-connectivity preservers of directed graphs under $k$ failures. To the best of our knowledge no non-trivial bound for this problem was known before, for a general $k$. We get our result by adopting the color-coding technique of Alon, Yuster, and Zwick [JACM'95].