This document is an informal bibliography of the papers dealing with distributed approximation algorithms on graphs classes that are sparse, but not in the classic setting of bounded degree. We call these classes structurally sparse which means that they are sparse because of their geometric nature (planar, bounded genus and unit-disk graphs) and/or because they have bounded parameters (arboricity, expansion, growth, independence) or forbidden structures (forbidden minors).
Introductory notesSome papers cited here deal with exact problems (not approximation problems), such as maximal independent set. These are included because of the strong connections between these exact problems and some technique used for approximation.We assume that the nodes do not have the knowledge of their locations. Some papers, especially in the literature about robots, assume such knowledge, and are not cited here.There has been series of papers improving one on the other, either generalizing on larger classes, or improving the approximation ratio. We chose to list the papers from the most recent to the oldest, to have the up-to-date results first. The bibliography generated at the end of this document is in alphabetical order to allow quick access to a specific reference. When citing a paper in the section of another paper, we first give the reference in term of section number and then as a pointer to the bibliography. Also, conference and journal versions sometimes differ, thus we cite all the versions. This document was first designed as a tool for personal research, but we decided to make it public as it seems it could be useful to others. It is not a very polished formal document, and we may have missed references, or not cited properly every paper. Please let us know if you find any mistake or omission.
Graph classes consideredThe well-known graphs classes considered in this document are : bounded-expansion, planar, unit-disk, bounded-genus, bounded-arboricity, boundedindependence (a.k.a. bounded-growth) and minor-closed graphs. The relations between these classes are the following: Planar ⊆ bounded-genus ⊆ minor-closed ⊆ bounded expansion. Bounded-genus ⊆ bounded arboricity Unit-disk graphs ⊆ bounded-independence.