Drawing Graphs in the Plane with High Resolution

This paper presents the problem of drawing a graph in the plane so that edges appear as straight lines and the minimum angle formed by any pair of incident edges is maximized. The resolution of a layout is defined to be the size of the minimum angle formed by incident edges of the graph, and the resolution of a graph to be the maximum resolution of any layout of the graph. The resolution R of a graph is characterized in terms of the maximum node degree d of the graph by proving that $\Omega (\frac{1}{{d^2 }}) \leqslant R \leqslant \frac{{2\pi }}{d}$ for any graph. Moreover, it is proved that $R = \Theta (\frac{1}{d})$ for many graphs including planar graphs, complete graphs, hypercubes, multidimensional meshes and tori, and other special networks. It is also shown that the problem of deciding if $R = \frac{{2\pi }}{d}$ for a graph is NP-hard for $d = 4$, and by using a counting argument that $R = O(\frac{{\log d}}{{d^2 }})$ for many graphs.