14,833 research outputs found
Problems on q-Analogs in Coding Theory
The interest in -analogs of codes and designs has been increased in the
last few years as a consequence of their new application in error-correction
for random network coding. There are many interesting theoretical, algebraic,
and combinatorial coding problems concerning these q-analogs which remained
unsolved. The first goal of this paper is to make a short summary of the large
amount of research which was done in the area mainly in the last few years and
to provide most of the relevant references. The second goal of this paper is to
present one hundred open questions and problems for future research, whose
solution will advance the knowledge in this area. The third goal of this paper
is to present and start some directions in solving some of these problems.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0805.3528 by other author
Reachability Preservers: New Extremal Bounds and Approximation Algorithms
We abstract and study \emph{reachability preservers}, a graph-theoretic
primitive that has been implicit in prior work on network design. Given a
directed graph and a set of \emph{demand pairs} , a reachability preserver is a sparse subgraph that preserves
reachability between all demand pairs.
Our first contribution is a series of extremal bounds on the size of
reachability preservers. Our main result states that, for an -node graph and
demand pairs of the form for a small node subset ,
there is always a reachability preserver on edges. We
additionally give a lower bound construction demonstrating that this upper
bound characterizes the settings in which size reachability preservers
are generally possible, in a large range of parameters.
The second contribution of this paper is a new connection between extremal
graph sparsification results and classical Steiner Network Design problems.
Surprisingly, prior to this work, the osmosis of techniques between these two
fields had been superficial. This allows us to improve the state of the art
approximation algorithms for the most basic Steiner-type problem in directed
graphs from the of Chlamatac, Dinitz, Kortsarz, and
Laekhanukit (SODA'17) to .Comment: SODA '1
Computing Bounds on Network Capacity Regions as a Polytope Reconstruction Problem
We define a notion of network capacity region of networks that generalizes
the notion of network capacity defined by Cannons et al. and prove its notable
properties such as closedness, boundedness and convexity when the finite field
is fixed. We show that the network routing capacity region is a computable
rational polytope and provide exact algorithms and approximation heuristics for
computing the region. We define the semi-network linear coding capacity region,
with respect to a fixed finite field, that inner bounds the corresponding
network linear coding capacity region, show that it is a computable rational
polytope, and provide exact algorithms and approximation heuristics. We show
connections between computing these regions and a polytope reconstruction
problem and some combinatorial optimization problems, such as the minimum cost
directed Steiner tree problem. We provide an example to illustrate our results.
The algorithms are not necessarily polynomial-time.Comment: Appeared in the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Information
Theory, 5 pages, 1 figur
Diversities and the Geometry of Hypergraphs
The embedding of finite metrics in has become a fundamental tool for
both combinatorial optimization and large-scale data analysis. One important
application is to network flow problems in which there is close relation
between max-flow min-cut theorems and the minimal distortion embeddings of
metrics into . Here we show that this theory can be generalized
considerably to encompass Steiner tree packing problems in both graphs and
hypergraphs. Instead of the theory of metrics and minimal distortion
embeddings, the parallel is the theory of diversities recently introduced by
Bryant and Tupper, and the corresponding theory of diversities and
embeddings which we develop here.Comment: 19 pages, no figures. This version: further small correction
Counting Steiner triple systems with classical parameters and prescribed rank
By a famous result of Doyen, Hubaut and Vandensavel \cite{DHV}, the 2-rank of
a Steiner triple system on points is at least , and equality
holds only for the classical point-line design in the projective geometry
. It follows from results of Assmus \cite{A} that, given any integer
with , there is a code containing
representatives of all isomorphism classes of STS with 2-rank at most
. Using a mixture of coding theoretic, geometric, design
theoretic and combinatorial arguments, we prove a general formula for the
number of distinct STS with 2-rank at most contained
in this code. This generalizes the only previously known cases, , proved
by Tonchev \cite{T01} in 2001, , proved by V. Zinoviev and D. Zinoviev
\cite{ZZ12} in 2012, and (V. Zinoviev and D. Zinoviev \cite{ZZ13},
\cite{ZZ13a} (2013), D. Zinoviev \cite{Z16} (2016)), while also unifying and
simplifying the proofs. This enumeration result allows us to prove lower and
upper bounds for the number of isomorphism classes of STS with 2-rank
exactly (or at most) . Finally, using our recent systematic
study of the ternary block codes of Steiner triple systems \cite{JT}, we obtain
analogous results for the ternary case, that is, for STS with 3-rank at
most (or exactly) . We note that this work provides the first
two infinite families of 2-designs for which one has non-trivial lower and
upper bounds for the number of non-isomorphic examples with a prescribed
-rank in almost the entire range of possible ranks.Comment: 27 page
Coding Theory and Algebraic Combinatorics
This chapter introduces and elaborates on the fruitful interplay of coding
theory and algebraic combinatorics, with most of the focus on the interaction
of codes with combinatorial designs, finite geometries, simple groups, sphere
packings, kissing numbers, lattices, and association schemes. In particular,
special interest is devoted to the relationship between codes and combinatorial
designs. We describe and recapitulate important results in the development of
the state of the art. In addition, we give illustrative examples and
constructions, and highlight recent advances. Finally, we provide a collection
of significant open problems and challenges concerning future research.Comment: 33 pages; handbook chapter, to appear in: "Selected Topics in
Information and Coding Theory", ed. by I. Woungang et al., World Scientific,
Singapore, 201
On Network Coding Capacity - Matroidal Networks and Network Capacity Regions
One fundamental problem in the field of network coding is to determine the
network coding capacity of networks under various network coding schemes. In
this thesis, we address the problem with two approaches: matroidal networks and
capacity regions.
In our matroidal approach, we prove the converse of the theorem which states
that, if a network is scalar-linearly solvable then it is a matroidal network
associated with a representable matroid over a finite field. As a consequence,
we obtain a correspondence between scalar-linearly solvable networks and
representable matroids over finite fields in the framework of matroidal
networks. We prove a theorem about the scalar-linear solvability of networks
and field characteristics. We provide a method for generating scalar-linearly
solvable networks that are potentially different from the networks that we
already know are scalar-linearly solvable.
In our capacity region approach, we define a multi-dimensional object, called
the network capacity region, associated with networks that is analogous to the
rate regions in information theory. For the network routing capacity region, we
show that the region is a computable rational polytope and provide exact
algorithms and approximation heuristics for computing the region. For the
network linear coding capacity region, we construct a computable rational
polytope, with respect to a given finite field, that inner bounds the linear
coding capacity region and provide exact algorithms and approximation
heuristics for computing the polytope. The exact algorithms and approximation
heuristics we present are not polynomial time schemes and may depend on the
output size.Comment: Master of Engineering Thesis, MIT, September 2010, 70 pages, 10
figure
Computational Geometry Column 42
A compendium of thirty previously published open problems in computational
geometry is presented.Comment: 7 pages; 72 reference
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