Hop doubling label indexing for point-to-point distance querying on scale-free networks

We study the problem of point-to-point distance querying for massive scale-free graphs, which is important for numerous applications. Given a directed or undirected graph, we propose to build an index for answering such queries based on a novel hop-doubling labeling technique. We derive bounds on the index size, the computation costs and I/O costs based on the properties of unweighted scale-free graphs. We show that our method is much more efficient and effective compared to the state-of-the-art techniques, in terms of both querying time and indexing costs. Our empirical study shows that our method can handle graphs that are orders of magnitude larger than existing methods.