We consider low connectivity variants of the Survivable Network with Minimum Number of Steiner Points (SN-MSP) problem: given a finite set $R$ of terminals in a metric space (M,d), a subset $B \subseteq R$ of "unstable" terminals, and connectivity requirements {r_{uv}: u,v \in R}, find a minimum size set $S \subseteq M$ of additional points such that the unit-disc graph of $R \cup S$ contains $r_{uv}$ pairwise internally edge-disjoint and $(B \cup S)$-disjoint $uv$-paths for all $u,v \in R$. The case when $r_{uv}=1$ for all $u,v \in R$ is the {\sf Steiner Tree with Minimum Number of Steiner Points} (ST-MSP) problem, and the case $r_{uv} \in \{0,1\}$ is the {\sf Steiner Forest with Minimum Number of Steiner Points} (SF-MSP) problem. Let $Δ$ be the maximum number of points in a unit ball such that the distance between any two of them is larger than 1. It is known that $Δ=5$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$ The previous known approximation ratio for {\sf ST-MSP} was $\lfloor (Δ+1)/2 \rfloor+1+ε$ in an arbitrary normed space \cite{NY}, and $2.5+ε$ in the Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^2$ \cite{cheng2008relay}. Our approximation ratio for ST-MSP is $1+\ln(Δ-1)+ε$ in an arbitrary normed space, which in $\mathbb{R}^2$ reduces to $1+\ln 4+ε< 2.3863 +ε$. For SN-MSP with $r_{uv} \in \{0,1,2\}$, we give a simple $Δ$-approximation algorithm. In particular, for SF-MSP, this improves the previous ratio $2Δ$.
On subexponential running times for approximating directed Steiner tree and related problems
This paper concerns proving almost tight (super-polynomial) running times, for achieving desired approximation ratios for various problems. To illustrate, the question we study, let us consider the Set-Cover problem with n elements and m sets. Now we specify our goal to approximate Set-Cover to a factor of (1-d)ln n, for a given parameter 0<d<1. What is the best possible running time for achieving such approximation? This question was answered implicitly in the work of Moshkovitz [Theory of Computing, 2015]: Assuming both the Projection Games Conjecture (PGC) and the Exponential-Time Hypothesi…
Breaching the 2-Approximation Barrier for Connectivity Augmentation: a Reduction to Steiner Tree
可生存网络设计的基本目标是建立一个廉价的网络,即使一些边缘/节点发生故障,也能保持给定节点集之间的连通性。连通性增强问题(CAP)可以说是这一领域中最基本的问题之一:给定一个$k$(-edge)-连通图$G$和一组额外的边(链路),选择链路的最小基数子集$A$,使得将$A$添加到$G$将其边连通性增加到$k+1$。直觉上,人们希望通过增加额外的边缘来使现有网络更加可靠。这个NP难题的最著名的近似因子是$2$,这可以通过多种方法来实现(第一个这样的结果是在[Frederickson和Jájá'81]中)。已知[Dinitz et al. 76] CAP可以简化为$k=1$的情况,也称为树扩充问题(TAP),对于奇数$k$,以及对于情况$k=2$,a.k.a.仙人掌扩增问题(CacAP),甚至$k$。已知有几种比$2$更好的近似算法用于TAP,最后是最近的$1.458$近似[Grandoni et al. '18]。然而,对于CacAP,最知名的近似是$2$。在本文中,我们突破了$2$近似障碍CacAP,因此CAP,提出了多项式时间$2\ln(4)-\frac{967}{1120}+ε<1.91$近似。以前的方法利用TAP的属性,这些属性似乎不能推广到CacAP。相反,我们使用减少施泰纳树的问题,这是以前使用的参数化算法[Basavaraju等人。'14]。这种减少不是近似保持,并且使…