On the number of higher order Delaunay triangulations

Higher order Delaunay triangulations are a generalization of the Delaunay triangulation that provides a class of well-shaped triangulations, over which extra criteria can be optimized. A triangulation is order-k Delaunay if the circumcircle of each triangle of the triangulation contains at most k points. In this paper we study lower and upper bounds on the number of higher order Delaunay triangulations, as well as their expected number for randomly distributed points. We show that arbitrarily large point sets can have a single higher order Delaunay triangulation, even for large orders, whereas for first order Delaunay triangulations, the maximum number is 2ⁿ⁻³. Next we show that uniformly distributed points have an expected number of at least 2^{ρ₁n(1+o(1))} first order Delaunay triangulations, where ρ₁ is an analytically defined constant (ρ₁≈0.525785), and for k>1, the expected number of order-k Delaunay triangulations (which are not order-i for any i<k) is at least 2^{ρ_kn(1+o(1))}, where ρ_k can be calculated numerically.