2026-07-23T04:33:07Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:24388 2025-12-12T15:01:21Z ddc:004 open_access

Directed Buy-At-Bulk Spanners Grigorescu, Elena Kumar, Nithish Lin, Young-San buy-at-bulk spanners minimum density junction tree resource constrained shortest path We present a framework that unifies directed buy-at-bulk network design and directed spanner problems, namely, buy-at-bulk spanners. The goal is to find a minimum-cost routing solution for network design problems that captures economies at scale, while satisfying demands and distance constraints for terminal pairs. A more restricted version of this problem was shown to be O(2^{log^{1-ε} n})-hard to approximate, where n is the number of vertices, under a standard complexity assumption, by Elkin and Peleg (Theory of Computing Systems, 2007). Our results for buy-at-bulk spanners are the following. - When the edge lengths are integral with magnitude polynomial in n we present: 1) An Õ(n^{4/5 + ε})-approximation polynomial-time randomized algorithm for uniform demands. 2) An Õ(k^{1/2 + ε})-approximation polynomial-time randomized algorithm for general demands, where k is the number of terminal pairs. This can be improved to an Õ(k^{ε})-approximation algorithm for the single-source problem. The same approximation ratios hold in the online setting. - When the edge lengths are rational and well-conditioned, we present an Õ(k^{1/2 + ε})-approximation polynomial-time randomized algorithm that may slightly violate the distance constraints. The result can be improved to an Õ(k^ε)-approximation algorithm for the single-source problem. The same approximation ratios hold for the online setting when the condition number is given in advance. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first sublinear factor approximation algorithms for directed buy-at-bulk spanners. We allow the edge lengths to be negative and the demands to be non-unit, unlike the previous literature. Our approximation ratios match the state-of-the-art ratios in special cases, namely, buy-at-bulk network design by Antonakopoulos (WAOA, 2010) and (online) weighted spanners by Grigorescu, Kumar, and Lin (APPROX 2023). Furthermore, we improve the competitive ratio for online buy-at-bulk by Chakrabarty, Ene, Krishnaswamy, and Panigrahi (SICOMP, 2018) by a factor of log R, where R is the ratio between the maximum demand and the minimum demand. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Elena Grigorescu and Nithish Kumar and Young-San Lin 2025 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 353, Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques (APPROX/RANDOM 2025) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX/RANDOM.2025.22 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-243885 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX/RANDOM.2025.22 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode