Network Flow Spanners

• Published in: LATIN 2006: Theoretical Informatics pp. 410 - 422
• Main Authors: Dragan, Feodor F., Yan, Chenyu
• Format: Book Chapter Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2006; Springer
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: 3SAT Instance; Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; Edge Capacity; Exact sciences and technology; Software; Span Subgraph; Span Tree; Stretch Factor; Theoretical computing; Network flow; Computer theory; Bandwidth; Subgraph; Electronic trade; Communication network; Fault tolerant system
• ISBN: 9783540327554; 354032755X
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/11682462_39

In this paper, motivated by applications of ordinary (distance) spanners in communication networks and to address such issues as bandwidth constraints on network links, link failures, network survivability, etc., we introduce a new notion of flow spanner, where one seeks a spanning subgraph H = (V,E′) of a graph G = (V,E) which provides a “good” approximation of the source-sink flows in G. We formulate few variants of this problem and investigate their complexities. A special attention is given to the version where H is required to be a tree.