1,760 research outputs found
The cavity approach for Steiner trees packing problems
The Belief Propagation approximation, or cavity method, has been recently
applied to several combinatorial optimization problems in its zero-temperature
implementation, the max-sum algorithm. In particular, recent developments to
solve the edge-disjoint paths problem and the prize-collecting Steiner tree
problem on graphs have shown remarkable results for several classes of graphs
and for benchmark instances. Here we propose a generalization of these
techniques for two variants of the Steiner trees packing problem where multiple
"interacting" trees have to be sought within a given graph. Depending on the
interaction among trees we distinguish the vertex-disjoint Steiner trees
problem, where trees cannot share nodes, from the edge-disjoint Steiner trees
problem, where edges cannot be shared by trees but nodes can be members of
multiple trees. Several practical problems of huge interest in network design
can be mapped into these two variants, for instance, the physical design of
Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) chips. The formalism described here relies
on two components edge-variables that allows us to formulate a massage-passing
algorithm for the V-DStP and two algorithms for the E-DStP differing in the
scaling of the computational time with respect to some relevant parameters. We
will show that one of the two formalisms used for the edge-disjoint variant
allow us to map the max-sum update equations into a weighted maximum matching
problem over proper bipartite graphs. We developed a heuristic procedure based
on the max-sum equations that shows excellent performance in synthetic networks
(in particular outperforming standard multi-step greedy procedures by large
margins) and on large benchmark instances of VLSI for which the optimal
solution is known, on which the algorithm found the optimum in two cases and
the gap to optimality was never larger than 4 %
Hypergraphic LP Relaxations for Steiner Trees
We investigate hypergraphic LP relaxations for the Steiner tree problem,
primarily the partition LP relaxation introduced by Koenemann et al. [Math.
Programming, 2009]. Specifically, we are interested in proving upper bounds on
the integrality gap of this LP, and studying its relation to other linear
relaxations. Our results are the following. Structural results: We extend the
technique of uncrossing, usually applied to families of sets, to families of
partitions. As a consequence we show that any basic feasible solution to the
partition LP formulation has sparse support. Although the number of variables
could be exponential, the number of positive variables is at most the number of
terminals. Relations with other relaxations: We show the equivalence of the
partition LP relaxation with other known hypergraphic relaxations. We also show
that these hypergraphic relaxations are equivalent to the well studied
bidirected cut relaxation, if the instance is quasibipartite. Integrality gap
upper bounds: We show an upper bound of sqrt(3) ~ 1.729 on the integrality gap
of these hypergraph relaxations in general graphs. In the special case of
uniformly quasibipartite instances, we show an improved upper bound of 73/60 ~
1.216. By our equivalence theorem, the latter result implies an improved upper
bound for the bidirected cut relaxation as well.Comment: Revised full version; a shorter version will appear at IPCO 2010
Spider covers for prize-collecting network activation problem
In the network activation problem, each edge in a graph is associated with an
activation function, that decides whether the edge is activated from
node-weights assigned to its end-nodes. The feasible solutions of the problem
are the node-weights such that the activated edges form graphs of required
connectivity, and the objective is to find a feasible solution minimizing its
total weight. In this paper, we consider a prize-collecting version of the
network activation problem, and present first non- trivial approximation
algorithms. Our algorithms are based on a new LP relaxation of the problem.
They round optimal solutions for the relaxation by repeatedly computing
node-weights activating subgraphs called spiders, which are known to be useful
for approximating the network activation problem
Algorithmic Aspects of Energy-Delay Tradeoff in Multihop Cooperative Wireless Networks
We consider the problem of energy-efficient transmission in delay constrained
cooperative multihop wireless networks. The combinatorial nature of cooperative
multihop schemes makes it difficult to design efficient polynomial-time
algorithms for deciding which nodes should take part in cooperation, and when
and with what power they should transmit. In this work, we tackle this problem
in memoryless networks with or without delay constraints, i.e., quality of
service guarantee. We analyze a wide class of setups, including unicast,
multicast, and broadcast, and two main cooperative approaches, namely: energy
accumulation (EA) and mutual information accumulation (MIA). We provide a
generalized algorithmic formulation of the problem that encompasses all those
cases. We investigate the similarities and differences of EA and MIA in our
generalized formulation. We prove that the broadcast and multicast problems
are, in general, not only NP hard but also o(log(n)) inapproximable. We break
these problems into three parts: ordering, scheduling and power control, and
propose a novel algorithm that, given an ordering, can optimally solve the
joint power allocation and scheduling problems simultaneously in polynomial
time. We further show empirically that this algorithm used in conjunction with
an ordering derived heuristically using the Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm
yields near-optimal performance in typical settings. For the unicast case, we
prove that although the problem remains NP hard with MIA, it can be solved
optimally and in polynomial time when EA is used. We further use our algorithm
to study numerically the trade-off between delay and power-efficiency in
cooperative broadcast and compare the performance of EA vs MIA as well as the
performance of our cooperative algorithm with a smart noncooperative algorithm
in a broadcast setting.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure
Conditional Reliability in Uncertain Graphs
Network reliability is a well-studied problem that requires to measure the
probability that a target node is reachable from a source node in a
probabilistic (or uncertain) graph, i.e., a graph where every edge is assigned
a probability of existence. Many approaches and problem variants have been
considered in the literature, all assuming that edge-existence probabilities
are fixed. Nevertheless, in real-world graphs, edge probabilities typically
depend on external conditions. In metabolic networks a protein can be converted
into another protein with some probability depending on the presence of certain
enzymes. In social influence networks the probability that a tweet of some user
will be re-tweeted by her followers depends on whether the tweet contains
specific hashtags. In transportation networks the probability that a network
segment will work properly or not might depend on external conditions such as
weather or time of the day. In this paper we overcome this limitation and focus
on conditional reliability, that is assessing reliability when edge-existence
probabilities depend on a set of conditions. In particular, we study the
problem of determining the k conditions that maximize the reliability between
two nodes. We deeply characterize our problem and show that, even employing
polynomial-time reliability-estimation methods, it is NP-hard, does not admit
any PTAS, and the underlying objective function is non-submodular. We then
devise a practical method that targets both accuracy and efficiency. We also
study natural generalizations of the problem with multiple source and target
nodes. An extensive empirical evaluation on several large, real-life graphs
demonstrates effectiveness and scalability of the proposed methods.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure
Approximation Algorithms for Steiner Tree Problems Based on Universal Solution Frameworks
This paper summarizes the work on implementing few solutions for the Steiner
Tree problem which we undertook in the PAAL project. The main focus of the
project is the development of generic implementations of approximation
algorithms together with universal solution frameworks. In particular, we have
implemented Zelikovsky 11/6-approximation using local search framework, and
1.39-approximation by Byrka et al. using iterative rounding framework. These
two algorithms are experimentally compared with greedy 2-approximation, with
exact but exponential time Dreyfus-Wagner algorithm, as well as with results
given by a state-of-the-art local search techniques by Uchoa and Werneck. The
results of this paper are twofold. On one hand, we demonstrate that high level
algorithmic concepts can be designed and efficiently used in C++. On the other
hand, we show that the above algorithms with good theoretical guarantees, give
decent results in practice, but are inferior to state-of-the-art heuristical
approaches
Minimum Cost Integral Network Coding
In this paper, we consider finding a minimum cost multicast subgraph with network coding, where the rate to inject packets on each link is constrained to be integral. In the usual minimum cost network coding formulation, the optimal solution cannot always be integral. Fractional rates can be well approximated by choosing the time unit large enough, but this increases the encoding and decoding complexity as well as delay at the terminals. We formulate this problem as an integer program, which is NP-hard. A greedy algorithm and an algorithm based on linear programming rounding are proposed, which have approximation ratios k and 2k respectively, where k is the number of sinks. Moreover, both algorithms can be decentralized. We show by simulation that our algorithms' average performance substantially exceeds their bounds on random graphs
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