DOI 10.1007s00453-005-1167-9 The k-Splittable Flow Problem 1.pdf

DOI: 10.1007/s00453-005-1167-9 Algorithmica (2005) 42: 231–248 Algorithmica ? 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. The k-Splittable Flow Problem1 Georg Baier,2 Ekkehard Ko?hler,2 and Martin Skutella3 Abstract. In traditional multi-commodity flow theory, the task is to send a certain amount of each commodity from its start to its target node, subject to capacity constraints on the edges. However, no restriction is imposed on the number of paths used for delivering each commodity; it is thus feasible to spread the flow over a large number of different paths. Motivated by routing problems arising in real-life applications, e.g., telecommunication, unsplittable flows have moved into the focus of research. Here, the demand of each commodity may not be split but has to be sent along a single path. In this paper a generalization of this problem is studied. In the considered flow model, a commodity can be split into a bounded number of chunks which can then be routed on different paths. In contrast to classical (splittable) flows and unsplittable flows, the single-commodity case of this problem is already NP-hard and even hard to approximate. We present approximation algorithms for the single- and multi-commodity case and point out strong connections to unsplittable flows. Moreover, results on the hardness of approximation are presented. In particular, we show that some of our approximation results are in fact best possible, unless P = NP. Key Words. Network flow, Approximation algorithm, Max-flow min-cut, Unsplittable flow. 1. Introduction. The k-splittable flow problem is!a multi-commodity flow problem in which each commodity may be shipped only on a restricted number of different paths. The number of possible paths can be the same for all commodities or it may depend on the particular commodity. Problems of this kind occur, for instance, in communication networks: Customers request connections of given capacities between certain pairs of terminals in the network. I