Summary: Hardness of Buy­at­Bulk Network Design
Matthew Andrews
Bell Laboratories
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
andrews@research.bell­labs.com
Abstract
We consider the Buy­at­Bulk network design problem in
which we wish to design a network for carrying multicom­
modity demands from a set of source nodes to a set of des­
tination nodes. The key feature of the problem is that the
cost of capacity on each edge is concave and hence exhibits
economies of scale. If the cost of capacity per unit length
can be different on different edges then we say that the prob­
lem is non­uniform. The problem is uniform otherwise.
We show that for any constant , if NP 6
ZPT IME(n polylog n ) then there is no O(log 1
2 N)­
approximation algorithm for non­uniform Buy­at­Bulk net­
work design and there is no O(log 1
4 N)­approximation

Source: Andrews, Matthew - Mathematics of Networks and Systems, Mathematical Sciences Research Center, Bell Laboratories

Collections: Mathematics; Computer Technologies and Information Sciences