Uniform Random Sampling of Planar Graphs in Linear Time

This article introduces new algorithms for the uniform random generation of labelled planar graphs. Its principles rely on Boltzmann samplers, as recently developed by Duchon, Flajolet, Louchard, and Schaeffer. It combines the Boltzmann framework, a suitable use of rejection, a new combinatorial bijection found by Fusy, Poulalhon, and Schaeffer, as well as a precise analytic description of the generating functions counting planar graphs, which was recently obtained by Gimenez and Noy. This gives rise to an extremely efficient algorithm for the random generation of planar graphs. There is a preprocessing step of some fixed small cost; and the expected time complexity of generation is quadratic for exact-size uniform sampling and linear for uniform approximate-size sampling. This greatly improves on the best previously known time complexity for exact-size uniform sampling of planar graphs with n vertices, which was a little over O(n(7)). (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 35, 464-522, 2009