Routing in Undirected Graphs with Constant Congestion

TL;DR

This paper presents a randomized algorithm for routing multiple source-sink pairs in undirected graphs with constant congestion, significantly improving the number of pairs routed compared to previous algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces an efficient randomized algorithm that routes a large fraction of the optimal pairs with constant congestion, surpassing prior methods' performance.

Findings

Routes Ω(OPT/polylog k) pairs with congestion 14

Improves upon previous algorithms that had higher congestion or lower routing guarantees

Achieves near-optimal routing performance with constant congestion

Abstract

Given an undirected graph G=(V,E), a collection (s_1,t_1),...,(s_k,t_k) of k source-sink pairs, and an integer c, the goal in the Edge Disjoint Paths with Congestion problem is to connect maximum possible number of the source-sink pairs by paths, so that the maximum load on any edge (called edge congestion) does not exceed c. We show an efficient randomized algorithm to route $\Omega(OPT/\poly\log k)$ source-sink pairs with congestion at most 14, where OPT is the maximum number of pairs that can be simultaneously routed on edge-disjoint paths. The best previous algorithm that routed $\Omega(OPT/\poly\log n)$ pairs required congestion $\poly(\log \log n)$, and for the setting where the maximum allowed congestion is bounded by a constant c, the best previous algorithms could only guarantee the routing of $OPT/n^{O(1/c)}$ pairs.