Approximation of Spanning Tree Congestion Using Hereditary Bisection

Author Petr Kolman



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Author Details

Petr Kolman
  • Department of Applied Mathematics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

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Petr Kolman. Approximation of Spanning Tree Congestion Using Hereditary Bisection. In 42nd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 327, pp. 63:1-63:6, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2025.63

Abstract

The Spanning Tree Congestion (STC) problem is the following NP-hard problem: given a graph G, construct a spanning tree T of G minimizing its maximum edge congestion where the congestion of an edge e ∈ T is the number of edges uv in G such that the unique path between u and v in T passes through e; the optimal value for a given graph G is denoted STC(G).
It is known that every spanning tree is an n/2-approximation for the STC problem. A long-standing problem is to design a better approximation algorithm. Our contribution towards this goal is an 𝒪(Δ⋅log^{3/2}n)-approximation algorithm where Δ is the maximum degree in G and n the number of vertices. For graphs with a maximum degree bounded by a polylog of the number of vertices, this is an exponential improvement over the previous best approximation.
Our main tool for the algorithm is a new lower bound on the spanning tree congestion which is of independent interest. Denoting by hb(G) the hereditary bisection of G which is the maximum bisection width over all subgraphs of G, we prove that for every graph G, STC(G) ≥ Ω(hb(G)/Δ).

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Mathematics of computing → Discrete mathematics
  • Theory of computation → Design and analysis of algorithms
Keywords
  • Spanning Tree Congestion
  • Bisection
  • Expansion
  • Divide and Conquer

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References

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