Safe Approximation—An Efficient Solution for a Hard Routing Problem

Abstract

The Disjoint Connecting Paths problem and its capacitated generalization, called Unsplittable Flow problem, play an important role in practical applications such as communication network design and routing. These tasks are NP-hard in general, but various polynomial-time approximations are known. Nevertheless, the approximations tend to be either too loose (allowing large deviation from the optimum), or too complicated, often rendering them impractical in large, complex networks. Therefore, our goal is to present a solution that provides a relatively simple, efficient algorithm for the unsplittable flow problem in large directed graphs, where the task is NP-hard, and is known to remain NP-hard even to approximate up to a large factor. The efficiency of our algorithm is achieved by sacrificing a small part of the solution space. This also represents a novel paradigm for approximation. Rather than giving up the search for an exact solution, we restrict the solution space to a subset that is the most important for applications, and excludes only a small part that is marginal in some well-defined sense. Specifically, the sacrificed part only contains scenarios where some edges are very close to saturation. Since nearly saturated links are undesirable in practical applications, therefore, excluding near saturation is quite reasonable from the practical point of view. We refer the solutions that contain no nearly saturated edges as safe solutions, and call the approach safe approximation. We prove that this safe approximation can be carried out efficiently. That is, once we restrict ourselves to safe solutions, we can find the exact optimum by a randomized polynomial time algorithm.