The Secluded Path problem models a situation where a sensitive information
has to be transmitted between a pair of nodes along a path in a network. The
measure of the quality of a selected path is its exposure, which is the total
weight of vertices in its closed neighborhood. In order to minimize the risk of
intercepting the information, we are interested in selecting a secluded path,
i.e. a path with a small exposure. Similarly, the Secluded Steiner Tree problem
is to find a tree in a graph connecting a given set of terminals such that the
exposure of the tree is minimized. The problems were introduced by Chechik et
al. in [ESA 2013]. Among other results, Chechik et al. have shown that Secluded
Path is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) on unweighted graphs being
parameterized by the maximum vertex degree of the graph and that Secluded
Steiner Tree is FPT parameterized by the treewidth of the graph. In this work,
we obtain the following results about parameterized complexity of secluded
connectivity problems.
We give FPT-algorithms deciding if a graph G with a given cost function
contains a secluded path and a secluded Steiner tree of exposure at most k with
the cost at most C.
We initiate the study of "above guarantee" parameterizations for secluded
problems, where the lower bound is given by the size of a Steiner tree.
We investigate Secluded Steiner Tree from kernelization perspective and
provide several lower and upper bounds when parameters are the treewidth, the
size of a vertex cover, maximum vertex degree and the solution size. Finally,
we refine the algorithmic result of Chechik et al. by improving the exponential
dependence from the treewidth of the input graph.Comment: Minor corrections are don