Decreasing verification radius in local certification

Abstract

This paper deals with local certification, specifically locally checkable proofs: given a graph property, the task is to certify whether a graph satisfies the property. The verification of this certification needs to be done locally without the knowledge of the whole graph. More precisely, a distributed algorithm, called a verifier, is executed on each vertex. The verifier observes the local neighborhood up to a constant distance and either accepts or rejects.

We examine the trade-off between the visibility radius and the size of certificates. We describe a procedure that decreases the radius by encoding the neighborhood of each vertex into its certificate. We also provide a corresponding lower bound on the required certificate size increase, showing that such an approach is close to optimal.