Efficient processing of distance queries in large graphs: a vertex cover approach

We propose a novel disk-based index for processing single-source shortest path or distance queries. The index is useful in a wide range of important applications (e.g., network analysis, routing planning, etc.). Our index is a tree-structured index constructed based on the concept of vertex cover. We propose an I/O-efficient algorithm to construct the index when the input graph is too large to fit in main memory. We give detailed analysis of I/O and CPU complexity for both index construction and query processing, and verify the efficiency of our index for query processing in massive real-world graphs.