Fault-Tolerant ST-Diameter Oracles

Given two vertex sets $S$ and $T$ in a graph, the $ST$-diameter is the maximum $s$-$t$-distance between vertices $s \in S$ and $t \in T$. We study the problem of estimating the $ST$-diameter of graphs that are subject to a small number of transient edge failures. An $f$-edge fault-tolerant $ST$-diameter oracle ($f$-FDO-$ST$) is a data structure that preprocesses a graph $G$, sets $S$, $T$, and a positive integer $f$. When queried with a set $F$ of at most $f$ failing edges, the oracle returns an estimate $\widehat{D}$ of the $ST$-diameter in $G-F$. The oracle is said to have stretch $\sigma \geq 1$ if $\operatorname{diam}(G{-}F,S,T) \leq \widehat{D} \leq \sigma \cdot \operatorname{diam}(G{-}F,S,T)$. We design new $f$-FDO-$ST$s by reducing their construction to that of all-pairs and single-source distance sensitivity oracles ($f$-DSOs). These are data structures that estimate the pairwise graph distances, or respectively the distances from a distinguished source, under up to $f$ failures. We obtain several new trade-offs between the size of the $ST$-diameter oracles, their stretch guarantees, query and preprocessing times by combining our black-box reductions with $f$-DSO results from the literature. We further provide a lower bound on the space requirement of approximate $ST$-diameter oracles. We prove that there exists a family of graphs for which any $f$-FDO-$ST$ with sensitivity $f \ge 2$ and stretch better than $5/3$ requires $\Omega(n^{3/2})$ bits of space, regardless of the query time.