A Fast Method for Shortest-Path Cover Identification in Large Complex Networks

Fast identifying the amount of information that can be gained by measuring a network via shortest-paths is one of the fundamental problem for networks exploration and monitoring. However, the existing methods are time-consuming for even moderate-scale networks. In this paper, we present a method for fast shortest-path cover identification in both exact and approximate scenarios based on the relationship between the identification and the shortest distance queries. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through synthetic and real-world networks. The experimental results show that our method is 10⁵ times faster than the existing methods and can solve the shortest-path cover identification in a few seconds for large-scale networks with millions of nodes and edges.