@online{DBLP:journals/corr/BringmannK17,
TITLE = {A Note on Hardness of Diameter Approximation},
AUTHOR = {Bringmann, Karl and Krinninger, Sebastian},
LANGUAGE = {eng},
URL = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.02127},
EPRINT = {1705.02127},
EPRINTTYPE = {arXiv},
YEAR = {2017},
ABSTRACT = {We revisit the hardness of approximating the diameter of a network. In the CONGEST model, $ \tilde \Omega (n) $ rounds are necessary to compute the diameter [Frischknecht et al. SODA'12]. Abboud et al. DISC 2016 extended this result to sparse graphs and, at a more fine-grained level, showed that, for any integer $ 1 \leq \ell \leq \operatorname{polylog} (n) $, distinguishing between networks of diameter $ 4 \ell + 2 $ and $ 6 \ell + 1 $ requires $ \tilde \Omega (n) $ rounds. We slightly tighten this result by showing that even distinguishing between diameter $ 2 \ell + 1 $ and $ 3 \ell + 1 $ requires $ \tilde \Omega (n) $ rounds. The reduction of Abboud et al. is inspired by recent conditional lower bounds in the RAM model, where the orthogonal vectors problem plays a pivotal role. In our new lower bound, we make the connection to orthogonal vectors explicit, leading to a conceptually more streamlined exposition. This is suited for teaching both the lower bound in the CONGEST model and the conditional lower bound in the RAM model.},
}