Low Ply Drawings of Trees

We consider the recently introduced model of low ply graph drawing, in which the ply-disks of the vertices do not have many common overlaps, which results in a good distribution of the vertices in the plane. The ply-disk of a vertex in a straight-line drawing is the disk centered at it whose radius is half the length of its longest incident edge. The largest number of ply-disks having a common overlap is called the ply-number of the drawing. We focus on trees. We first consider drawings of trees with constant ply-number, proving that they may require exponential area, even for stars, and that they may not even exist for bounded-degree trees. Then, we turn our attention to drawings with logarithmic ply-number and show that trees with maximum degree 6 always admit such drawings in polynomial area