Property testing of planarity in the CONGEST model

We give a distributed algorithm in the CONGEST model for property testing of planarity with one-sided error in general (unbounded-degree) graphs. Following Censor-Hillel et al. (Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, pp. 43–56, 2016), who recently initiated the study of property testing in the distributed setting, our algorithm gives the following guarantee: For a graph G= (V, E) and a distance parameter ϵ, if G is planar, then every node outputs accept, and if G is ϵ-far from being planar (i.e., more than ϵ· | E| edges need to be removed in order to make G planar), then with probability 1 - 1 / poly (n) at least one node outputs reject. The algorithm runs in O(log | V| · poly (1 / ϵ)) rounds, and we show that this result is tight in terms of the dependence on |V|. Our algorithm combines several techniques of graph partitioning and local verification of planar embeddings. Furthermore, we show how a main subroutine in our algorithm can be applied to derive additional results for property testing of cycle-freeness and bipartiteness, as well as the construction of spanners, in minor-free (unweighted) graphs.