Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Grigorescu, Elena, Kumar, Nithish Kumar, Lin, Young-San
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05526
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911155954384896
author Grigorescu, Elena
Kumar, Nithish Kumar
Lin, Young-San
author_facet Grigorescu, Elena
Kumar, Nithish Kumar
Lin, Young-San
contents Designing sparse directed spanners, which are subgraphs that approximately maintain distance constraints, has attracted sustained interest in TCS, especially due to their wide applicability, as well as the difficulty to obtain tight results. However, a significant drawback of the notion of spanners is that it does not capture a natural setting where demand pairs are subject to restrictions beyond a distance constraint. In this paper we initiate the study of **routing-controlled spanners**, where in addition to distance constraints, demand pairs are also subjected to routing constraints, which may require or forbid visiting specific vertices on feasible paths. The goal is to find a minimum-cost routing solution that satisfies the multiple constraints. Moreover, we introduce an even more general notion, which we call **packing-covering spanner**, where each demand pair is subjected to a number of packing and covering constraints, in addition to a distance constraint. Packing-covering spanners capture other natural network connectivity problems such as optimal hopsets and graph spanners for group Steiner distances. To the best of our knowledge, we obtain the first approximation algorithms for the packing-covering spanner problem, and thus for the routing-controlled spanners, under natural assumptions. Our results match the state-of-the-art approximation ratios in special cases of ours, such as Steiner Forests and Directed Spanners. Our results also imply approximation algorithms for optimal hopsets and graph spanners for group Steiner distances in the directed setting, and position packing-covering spanners as a natural abstraction unifying several well-studied problems in directed network design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_05526
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Routing-Controlled Spanners
Grigorescu, Elena
Kumar, Nithish Kumar
Lin, Young-San
Data Structures and Algorithms
Designing sparse directed spanners, which are subgraphs that approximately maintain distance constraints, has attracted sustained interest in TCS, especially due to their wide applicability, as well as the difficulty to obtain tight results. However, a significant drawback of the notion of spanners is that it does not capture a natural setting where demand pairs are subject to restrictions beyond a distance constraint. In this paper we initiate the study of **routing-controlled spanners**, where in addition to distance constraints, demand pairs are also subjected to routing constraints, which may require or forbid visiting specific vertices on feasible paths. The goal is to find a minimum-cost routing solution that satisfies the multiple constraints. Moreover, we introduce an even more general notion, which we call **packing-covering spanner**, where each demand pair is subjected to a number of packing and covering constraints, in addition to a distance constraint. Packing-covering spanners capture other natural network connectivity problems such as optimal hopsets and graph spanners for group Steiner distances. To the best of our knowledge, we obtain the first approximation algorithms for the packing-covering spanner problem, and thus for the routing-controlled spanners, under natural assumptions. Our results match the state-of-the-art approximation ratios in special cases of ours, such as Steiner Forests and Directed Spanners. Our results also imply approximation algorithms for optimal hopsets and graph spanners for group Steiner distances in the directed setting, and position packing-covering spanners as a natural abstraction unifying several well-studied problems in directed network design.
title Routing-Controlled Spanners
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05526