A near-optimal distributed fully dynamic algorithm for maintaining sparse spanners

Currently, there are no known explicit algorithms for the great majority of graph problems in the dynamic distributed message-passing model. Instead, most state-of-the-art dynamic distributed algorithms are constructed by composing a static algorithm for the problem at hand with a simulation technique that converts static algorithms to dynamic ones. We argue that this powerful methodology does not provide satisfactory solutions for many important dynamic distributed problems, and this necessitates developing algorithms for these problems from scratch.