Provisioning a virtual private network under the presence of non-communicating groups

Virtual private network design in the hose model deals with the reservation of capacities in a weighted graph such that the terminals in this network can communicate with one another. Each terminal is equipped with an upper bound on the amount of traffic that the terminal can send or receive. The task is to install capacities at minimum cost and to compute paths for each unordered terminal pair such that each valid traffic matrix can be routed along those paths. In this paper we consider a variant of the virtual private network design problem which generalizes the previously studied symmetric and asymmetric case. In our model the terminal set is partitioned into a number of groups, where terminals of each group do not communicate with each other. Our main result is a 4.74 approximation algorithm for this problem. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006

On the Complexity of the Asymmetric VPN Problem

We give the first constant factor approximation algorithm for the asymmetric Virtual Private Network (VPN) problem with arbitrary concave costs. We even show the stronger result, that there is always a tree solution of cost at most 2 OPT and that a tree solution of (expected) cost at most 49.84 OPT can be determined in polynomial time. Furthermore, we answer an outstanding open question about the complexity status of the so called balanced VPN problem by proving its NP-hardness

Network Design via Core Detouring for Problems Without a Core

Some of the currently best-known approximation algorithms for network design are based on random sampling. One of the key steps of such algorithms is connecting a set of source nodes to a random subset of them. In a recent work [Eisenbrand,Grandoni,Rothvo\ss,Schäfer-SODA'08], a new technique, \emph{core-detouring}, is described to bound the mentioned connection cost. This is achieved by defining a sub-optimal connection scheme, where paths are detoured through a proper connected subgraph (core). The cost of the detoured paths is bounded against the cost of the core and of the distances from the sources to the core. The analysis then boils down to proving the \emph{existence} of a convenient core. For some problems, such as connected facility location and single-sink rent-or-buy, the choice of the core is obvious (i.e., the Steiner tree in the optimum solution). Other, more complex network design problems do not exhibit any such core. In this paper we show that core-detouring can be nonetheless successfully applied. The basic idea is constructing a convenient core by manipulating the optimal solution in a proper (not necessarily trivial) way. We illustrate that by presenting improved approximation algorithms for two well-studied problems: virtual private network design and single-sink buy-at-bulk

Steiner Tree Approximation via Iterative Randomized Rounding

The Steiner tree problem is one of the most fundamental NP-hard problems: given a weighted undirected graph and a subset of terminal nodes, find a minimum-cost tree spanning the terminals. In a sequence of papers, the approximation ratio for this problem was improved from 2 to 1.55 [Robins,Zelikovsky-'05]. All these algorithms are purely combinatorial. A long-standing open problem is whether there is an LP relaxation of Steiner tree with integrality gap smaller than 2 [Vazirani,Rajagopalan-'99]. In this paper we present an LP-based approximation algorithm for Steiner tree with an improved approximation factor. Our algorithm is based on a, seemingly novel, \emph{iterative randomized rounding} technique. We consider an LP relaxation of the problem, which is based on the notion of directed components. We sample one component with probability proportional to the value of the associated variable in a fractional solution: the sampled component is contracted and the LP is updated consequently. We iterate this process until all terminals are connected. Our algorithm delivers a solution of cost at most ln(4)+\eps<1.39 times the cost of an optimal Steiner tree. The algorithm can be derandomized using the method of limited independence. As a byproduct of our analysis, we show that the integrality gap of our LP is at most 1.55, hence answering to the mentioned open question. This might have consequences for a number of related problems

An improved approximation algorithm for virtual private network design

Virtual private network design deals with the reservation of capacities in a network, such that the nodes can share communication. Each node in the network has associated upper bounds on the amount of flow that it can send to the network and receive from the network respectively. The problem then is to reserve capacities at minimum cost and to compute paths between every pair of nodes such that all valid traffic-matrices can be routed along the corresponding paths. In this paper we present a simple 4.74-approximation algorithm for virtual private network design. The previous best approximation algorithm for this problem achieves a ratio of 5.55 (Gupta, Kumar, and Roughgarden STOC'03)