Survivable Network Design for Group Connectivity in Low-Treewidth Graphs

In the Group Steiner Tree problem (GST), we are given a (edge or vertex)-weighted graph G=(V,E) on n vertices, together with a root vertex r and a collection of groups {S_i}_{i in [h]}: S_i subseteq V(G). The goal is to find a minimum-cost subgraph H that connects the root to every group. We consider a fault-tolerant variant of GST, which we call Restricted (Rooted) Group SNDP. In this setting, each group S_i has a demand k_i in [k], k in N, and we wish to find a minimum-cost subgraph H subseteq G such that, for each group S_i, there is a vertex in the group that is connected to the root via k_i (vertex or edge) disjoint paths. While GST admits O(log^2 n log h) approximation, its higher connectivity variants are known to be Label-Cover hard, and for the vertex-weighted version, the hardness holds even when k=2 (it is widely believed that there is no subpolynomial approximation for the Label-Cover problem [Bellare et al., STOC 1993]). More precisely, the problem admits no 2^{log^{1-epsilon}n}-approximation unless NP subseteq DTIME(n^{polylog(n)}). Previously, positive results were known only for the edge-weighted version when k=2 [Gupta et al., SODA 2010; Khandekar et al., Theor. Comput. Sci., 2012] and for a relaxed variant where k_i disjoint paths from r may end at different vertices in a group [Chalermsook et al., SODA 2015], for which the authors gave a bicriteria approximation. For k >= 3, there is no non-trivial approximation algorithm known for edge-weighted Restricted Group SNDP, except for the special case of the relaxed variant on trees (folklore). Our main result is an O(log n log h) approximation algorithm for Restricted Group SNDP that runs in time n^{f(k, w)}, where w is the treewidth of the input graph. Our algorithm works for both edge and vertex weighted variants, and the approximation ratio nearly matches the lower bound when k and w are constants. The key to achieving this result is a non-trivial extension of a framework introduced in [Chalermsook et al., SODA 2017]. This framework first embeds all feasible solutions to the problem into a dynamic program (DP) table. However, finding the optimal solution in the DP table remains intractable. We formulate a linear program relaxation for the DP and obtain an approximate solution via randomized rounding. This framework also allows us to systematically construct DP tables for high-connectivity problems. As a result, we present new exact algorithms for several variants of survivable network design problems in low-treewidth graphs.