An Elementary Construction of Constant-Degree Expanders

Abstract

We describe a short and easy-to-analyse construction of constant-degree expanders. The construction relies on the replacement product, applied by Reingold, Vadhan and Wigderson (2002) to give an iterative construction of bounded-degree expanders. Here we give a simpler construction, which applies the replacement product (only twice!) to turn the Cayley expanders of Alon and Roichman (1994), whose degree is polylog n, into constant-degree expanders. This enables us to prove the required expansion using a simple new combinatorial analysis of the replacement product (instead of the spectral analysis used by Reingold, Vadhan and Wigderson).