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Serge A. Plotkin

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31 papers
2 author rows

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31

FOCS Conference 2001 Conference Paper

Designing Networks Incrementally

  • Adam Meyerson
  • Kamesh Munagala
  • Serge A. Plotkin

We consider the problem of incrementally designing a network to route demand to a single sink on an underlying metric space. We are given cables whose costs per unit length scale in a concave fashion with capacity. Under certain natural restrictions on the costs (called the Access Network Design constraints), we present a simple and efficient randomized algorithm that is competitive to the minimum cost solution when the demand points arrive online. In particular, if the order of arrival is a random permutation, we can prove a O(1) competitive ratio. For the fully adversarial case, the algorithm is O(K) -competitive, where K is the number of different pipe types. Since the value of K is typically small, this improves the previous O(log n log log n)-competitive algorithm which was based on probabilistically approximating the underlying metric by a tree metric. Our algorithm also improves the best known approximation ratio and running time for the offline version of this problem.

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FOCS Conference 2000 Conference Paper

Cost-Distance: Two Metric Network Design

  • Adam Meyerson
  • Kamesh Munagala
  • Serge A. Plotkin

Presents the cost-distance problem, which consists of finding a Steiner tree which optimizes the sum of edge costs along one metric and the sum of source-sink distances along an unrelated second metric. We give the first known O(log k) randomized approximation scheme for the cost-distance problem, where k is the number of sources. We reduce several common network design problems to cost-distance problems, obtaining (in some cases) the first known logarithmic approximation for them. These problems include a single-sink buy-at-bulk problem with variable pipe types between different sets of nodes, facility location with buy-at-bulk-type costs on edges, constructing single-source multicast trees with good cost and delay properties, and multi-level facility location. Our algorithm is also easier to implement and significantly faster than previously known algorithms for buy-at-bulk design problems.

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FOCS Conference 1998 Conference Paper

Approximating a Finite Metric by a Small Number of Tree Metrics

  • Moses Charikar
  • Chandra Chekuri
  • Ashish Goel
  • Sudipto Guha
  • Serge A. Plotkin

Y. Bartal (1996, 1998) gave a randomized polynomial time algorithm that given any n point metric G, constructs a tree T such that the expected stretch (distortion) of any edge is at most O (log n log log n). His result has found several applications and in particular has resulted in approximation algorithms for many graph optimization problems. However approximation algorithms based on his result are inherently randomized. In this paper we derandomize the use of Bartal's algorithm in the design of approximation algorithms. We give an efficient polynomial time algorithm that given a finite n point metric G, constructs O(n log n) trees and a probability distribution /spl mu/ on them such that the expected stretch of any edge of G in a tree chosen according to /spl mu/ is at most O(log n log log n). Our result establishes that finite metrics can be probabilistically approximated by a small number of tree metrics. We obtain the first deterministic approximation algorithms for buy-at-bulk network design and vehicle routing; in addition we subsume results from our earlier work on derandomization. Our main result is obtained by a novel view of probabilistic approximation of metric spaces as a deterministic optimization problem via linear programming.

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FOCS Conference 1993 Conference Paper

Throughput-Competitive On-Line Routing

  • Baruch Awerbuch
  • Yossi Azar
  • Serge A. Plotkin

We develop a framework that allows us to address the issues of admission control and routing in high-speed networks under the restriction that once a call is admitted and routed, it has to proceed to completion and no reroutings are allowed. The "no rerouting" restriction appears in all the proposals for future high-speed networks and stems from current hardware limitations, in particular the fact that the bandwidth-delay product of the newly developed optical communication links far exceeds the buffer capacity of the network. In case the goal is to maximize the throughput, our framework yields an on-line O(log nT)-competitive strategy, where n is the number of nodes in the network and T is the maximum call duration. In other words, our strategy results in throughput that is within O(log nT) factor of the highest possible throughput achievable by an omniscient algorithm that knows all of the requests in advance. Moreover, we show that no on-line strategy can achieve a better competitive ratio. Our framework leads to competitive strategies applicable in several more general settings. Extensions include assigning each connection an associated "profit" that represents the importance of this connection, and addressing the issue of call-establishment costs. >

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FOCS Conference 1991 Conference Paper

Fast Approximation Algorithms for Fractional Packing and Covering Problems

  • Serge A. Plotkin
  • David B. Shmoys
  • Éva Tardos

Fast algorithms that find approximate solutions for a general class of problems, which are called fractional packing and covering problems, are presented. The only previously known algorithms for solving these problems are based on general linear programming techniques. The techniques developed greatly outperform the general methods in many applications, and are extensions of a method previously applied to find approximate solutions to multicommodity flow problems. The algorithms are based on a Lagrangian relaxation technique, and an important result is a theoretical analysis of the running time of a Lagrangian relaxation based algorithm. Several applications of the algorithms are presented. >

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FOCS Conference 1989 Conference Paper

Interior-Point Methods in Parallel Computation

  • Andrew V. Goldberg
  • Serge A. Plotkin
  • David B. Shmoys
  • Éva Tardos

Interior-point methods for linear programming, developed in the context of sequential computation, are used to obtain a parallel algorithm for the bipartite matching problem. The algorithm runs in O*( square root m) time. The results extend to the weighted bipartite matching problem and to the zero-one minimum-cost flow problem, yielding O*( square root m log C) algorithms. This improves previous bounds on these problems and illustrates the importance of interior-point methods in parallel algorithm design. >

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FOCS Conference 1989 Conference Paper

Network Decomposition and Locality in Distributed Computation

  • Baruch Awerbuch
  • Andrew V. Goldberg
  • Michael Luby
  • Serge A. Plotkin

The authors introduce a concept of network decomposition, a partitioning of an arbitrary graph into small-diameter connected components, such that the graph created by contracting each component into a single node has low chromatic number. They present an efficient distributed algorithm for constructing such a decomposition and demonstrate its use for design of efficient distributed algorithms. The method yields new deterministic distributed algorithms for finding a maximal independent set in an arbitrary graph and for ( Delta +1)-coloring of graphs with maximum degree Delta. These algorithms run in O(n/sup epsilon /) time for epsilon =O((log log n/log n)/sup 1/2/), whereas the best previously known deterministic algorithms required Omega (n) time. The techniques can also be used to remove randomness from the previously known most distributed breadth-first search algorithm. >

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FOCS Conference 1988 Conference Paper

Combinatorial Algorithms for the Generalized Circulation Problem

  • Andrew V. Goldberg
  • Serge A. Plotkin
  • Éva Tardos

A generalization of the maximum-flow problem is considered in which the amounts of flow entering and leaving an arc are linearly related. More precisely, if x(e) units of flow enter an arc e, x(e) lambda (e) units arrive at the other end. For instance, nodes of the graph can correspond to different currencies, with the multipliers being the exchange rates. Conservation of flow is required at every node except a given source node. The goal is to maximize the amount of flow excess at the source. This problem is a special case of linear programming, and therefore can be solved in polynomial time. The authors present polynomial-time combinatorial algorithms for this problem. The algorithms are simple and intuitive. >

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FOCS Conference 1988 Conference Paper

Sublinear-Time Parallel Algorithms for Matching and Related Problems

  • Andrew V. Goldberg
  • Serge A. Plotkin
  • Pravin M. Vaidya

The authors present the first sub-linear-time deterministic parallel algorithms for bipartite matching and several related problems, including maximal node-disjoint paths, depth-first search, and flows in zero-one networks. The results are based on a better understanding of the combinatorial structure of the above problems, which lead to new algorithmic techniques. In particular, it is shown how to use maximal matching to extend, in parallel, a current set of node-disjoint paths and how to take advantage of the parallelism that arises when a large number of nodes are active during an execution of a push/relabel network flow algorithm. It is also shown how to apply the techniques to design parallel algorithms for the weighted versions of the above problems. >

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FOCS Conference 1987 Conference Paper

Local Management of a Global Resource in a Communication Network

  • Yehuda Afek
  • Baruch Awerbuch
  • Serge A. Plotkin
  • Michael E. Saks

We introduce a new primitive, the Resource Controller, which abstracts the problem of controlling the total amount of resources consumed by a distributed algorithm. We present an efficient distributed algorithm to implement this abstraction. The message complexity of our algorithm per participating node is polylogarithmic in the size of the network, compared to the linear cost per node of the naive algorithm. The implementation of our algorithm is simple and practical and the techniques used are interesting because a global quantity is managed in a distributed way. The Resource Controller can be used to construct efficient algorithms for a number of important problems, such as the problem of bounding the worst-case message complexity of a protocol and the problem of dynamically assigning unique names to nodes participating in a protocol.

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