Nicolas Bousquet, Louis Esperet, Laurent Feuilloley, Sébastien Zeitoun.
Theoretical
Computer Science
Volume 1061, 19 January 2026, 115643.
doi:
10.1016/j.tcs.2025.115643
Nicolas Bousquet, Louis Esperet, Laurent Feuilloley, Sébastien Zeitoun.
Theoretical
Computer Science
Volume 1061, 19 January 2026, 115643.
doi:
10.1016/j.tcs.2025.115643
Local certification is the area of distributed network computing asking the following question: How to certify to the nodes of a network that a global property holds, if they are limited to a local verification?
In this area, it is often essential to have identifiers, that is, unique integers assigned to the nodes. In this short paper, we show how to reduce the range of the identifiers, in three different settings. More precisely, we show how to rename identifiers in the classical local certification setting, when we can (resp.\ cannot) choose the new identifiers, and we show how a global certificate can help to encode very compactly a new identifier assignment that is not injective in general, but still useful in applications.
We conclude with a number of applications of these results: For every $\ell$, there are local certification schemes for the properties of having clique number at most $\ell$, having diameter at most $\ell$, and having independence number at most~2, with certificates of size. We also show that there is a global certification scheme for bipartiteness with a certificate of size $O(n)$. All these results are optimal.