Improving spanning trees by upgrading nodes

We study budget constrained optimal network upgrading problems. Such problems aim at finding optimal strategies for improving a network under some cost measure subject to certain budget constraints. A general problem in this setting is the following. We are given an edge weighted graph G = (V, E) where nodes represent processors and edges represent bidirectional communication links. The processor at a node v {element_of} V can be upgraded at a cost of c(v). Such an upgrade reduces the delay of each link emanating from v. The goal is to find a minimum cost set of nodes to be upgraded so that the resulting network has the best performance with respect to some measure. We consider the problem under two measures, namely, the weight of a minimum spanning tree and the bottleneck weight of a minimum bottleneck spanning tree. We present approximation and hardness results for the problem. Our results are tight to within constant factors. We also show that these approximation algorithms can be used to construct good approximation algorithms for the dual versions of the problems where there is a budget constraint on the upgrading cost and the objectives are minimum weight spanning tree and minimum bottleneck weight spanning tree respectively

Node weighted network upgrade problems

Consider a network where nodes represent processors and edges represent bidirectional communication links. The processor at a node v can be upgraded at an expense of cost(v). Such an upgrade reduces the delay of each link emanating from v by a fixed factor x, where 0 < x < 1. The goal is to find a minimum cost set of nodes to be upgraded so that the resulting network has a spanning tree in which edge is of delay at most a given value {delta}. The authors provide both hardness and approximation results for the problem. They show that the problem is NP-hard and cannot be approximated within any factor {beta} < ln n, unless NP {improper_subset} DTIME(n{sup log log n}), where n is the number of nodes in the network. They then present the first polynomial time approximation algorithms for the problem. For the general case, the approximation algorithm comes within a factor of 2 ln n of the minimum upgrading cost. When the cost of upgrading each node is 1, they present an approximation algorithm with a performance guarantee of 4(2 + ln {Delta}), where {Delta} is the maximum node degree. Finally, they present a polynomial time algorithm for the class of treewidth-bounded graphs

On Colorful Bin Packing Games

We consider colorful bin packing games in which selfish players control a set of items which are to be packed into a minimum number of unit capacity bins. Each item has one of $m\geq 2$ colors and cannot be packed next to an item of the same color. All bins have the same unitary cost which is shared among the items it contains, so that players are interested in selecting a bin of minimum shared cost. We adopt two standard cost sharing functions: the egalitarian cost function which equally shares the cost of a bin among the items it contains, and the proportional cost function which shares the cost of a bin among the items it contains proportionally to their sizes. Although, under both cost functions, colorful bin packing games do not converge in general to a (pure) Nash equilibrium, we show that Nash equilibria are guaranteed to exist and we design an algorithm for computing a Nash equilibrium whose running time is polynomial under the egalitarian cost function and pseudo-polynomial for a constant number of colors under the proportional one. We also provide a complete characterization of the efficiency of Nash equilibria under both cost functions for general games, by showing that the prices of anarchy and stability are unbounded when $m\geq 3$ while they are equal to 3 for black and white games, where $m=2$. We finally focus on games with uniform sizes (i.e., all items have the same size) for which the two cost functions coincide. We show again a tight characterization of the efficiency of Nash equilibria and design an algorithm which returns Nash equilibria with best achievable performance

On optimal strategies for upgrading networks

We study {ital budget constrained optimal network upgrading problems}. Such problems aim at finding optimal strategies for improving a network under some cost measure subject to certain budget constraints. Given an edge weighted graph {ital G(V,E)}, in the {ital edge based upgrading model}, it is assumed that each edge {ital e} of the given network has an associated function {ital c(e)} that specifies for each edge {ital e} the amount by which the length {ital l(e)} is to be reduced. In the {ital node based upgrading model} a node {ital v} can be upgraded at an expense of cost {ital (v)}. Such an upgrade reduces the cost of each edge incident on {ital v} by a fixed factor {rho}, where 0 < {rho} < 1. For a given budget, {ital B}, the goal is to find an improvement strategy such that the total cost of reduction is a most the given budget {ital B} and the cost of a subgraph (e.g. minimum spanning tree) under the modified edge lengths is the best over all possible strategies which obey the budget constraint. Define an ({alpha},{beta})-approximation algorithm as a polynomial-time algorithm that produces a solution within {alpha} times the optimal function value, violating the budget constraint by a factor of at most {Beta}. The results obtained in this paper include the following 1. We show that in general the problem of computing optimal reduction strategy for modifying the network as above is {bold NP}-hard. 2. In the node based model, we show how to devise a near optimal strategy for improving the bottleneck spanning tree. The algorithms have a performance guarantee of (2 ln {ital n}, 1). 3. for the edge based improvement problems we present improved (in terms of performance and time) approximation algorithms. 4. We also present pseudo-polynomial time algorithms (extendible to polynomial time approximation schemes) for a number of edge/node based improvement problems when restricted to the class of treewidth-bounded graphs

An Introduction to Temporal Graphs: An Algorithmic Perspective

A \emph{temporal graph} is, informally speaking, a graph that changes with time. When time is discrete and only the relationships between the participating entities may change and not the entities themselves, a temporal graph may be viewed as a sequence $G_1,G_2\ldots,G_l$ of static graphs over the same (static) set of nodes $V$. Though static graphs have been extensively studied, for their temporal generalization we are still far from having a concrete set of structural and algorithmic principles. Recent research shows that many graph properties and problems become radically different and usually substantially more difficult when an extra time dimension in added to them. Moreover, there is already a rich and rapidly growing set of modern systems and applications that can be naturally modeled and studied via temporal graphs. This, further motivates the need for the development of a temporal extension of graph theory. We survey here recent results on temporal graphs and temporal graph problems that have appeared in the Computer Science community