A Tight Subexponential-time Algorithm for Two-Page Book Embedding

A book embedding of a graph is a drawing that maps vertices onto a line and edges to simple pairwise non-crossing curves drawn into “pages”, which are half-planes bounded by that line. Two-page book embeddings, i.e., book embeddings into 2 pages, are of special importance as they are both NP-hard to compute and have specific applications. We obtain a 2O(√n) algorithm for computing a book embedding of an n-vertex graph on two pages—a result which is asymptotically tight under the Exponential Time Hypothesis. As a key tool in our approach, we obtain a single-exponential fixed-parameter algorithm for the same problem when parameterized by the treewidth of the input graph. We conclude by establishing the fixed-parameter tractability of computing minimum-page book embeddings when parameterized by the feedback edge number, settling an open question arising from previous work on the problem.