Experimental evaluation of approximation algorithms for single-source unsplittable flow.pdf

Experimental evaluation of approximationalgorithms for single-source unsplittable owStavros G. Kolliopoulos? and Cliord Stein??Abstract. In the single-source unsplittable ow problem, we are givena network G; a source vertex s and k commodities with sinks ti andreal-valued demands i; 1  i  k: We seek to route the demand i ofeach commodity i along a single s-ti ow path, so that the total owrouted across any edge e is bounded by the edge capacity ce: This NP-hard problem combines the diculty of bin-packing with routing throughan arbitrary graph and has many interesting and important variations.In this paper we initiate the experimental evaluation of approximationalgorithms for unsplittable ow problems. We examine the quality of ap-proximation achieved by several algorithms for nding a solution withnear-optimal congestion. In the process we analyze theoretically a newalgorithm and report on the practical relevance of heuristics based onminimum-cost ow. The experimental results demonstrate practical per-formance that is better than the theoretical guarantees for all algorithmstested. Moreover modications to the algorithms to achieve better theo-retical results translate to improvements in practice as well.1 IntroductionIn the single-source unsplittable ow problem (Ufp), we are given a networkG = (V;E; u); a source vertex s and a set of k commodities with sinks t1; : : : ; tkand associated real-valued demands 1; : : : ; k: We seek to route the demandi of each commodity i; along a single s-ti ow path, so that the total owrouted across any edge e is bounded by the edge capacity ue: See Figure 1 foran example instance. The minimum edge capacity is assumed to have value atleast maxi i:The requirement of routing each commodity on a single path bears resem-blance to integral multicommodity ow and in particular to the multiple-sourceedge-disjoint path problem. For the latter problem, a large amount of work ex-ists either for solving exactly interesting spec