Experimental Study of Geometric t-Spanners

The construction of t-spanners of a given point set has received a lot of attention, especially from a theoretical perspective. In this article, we experimentally study the performance and quality of the most common construction algorithms for points in the Euclidean plane. We implemented the most well-known t-spanner algorithms and tested them on a number of different point sets. The experiments are discussed and compared to the theoretical results, and in several cases, we suggest modifications that are implemented and evaluated. The measures of quality that we consider are the number of edges, the weight, the maximum degree, the spanner diameter, and the number of crossings. This is the first time an extensive comparison has been made between the running times of construction algorithms of t-spanners and the quality of the generated spanners