Improved Approximation Algorithms for Steiner Connectivity Augmentation Problems

The Weighted Connectivity Augmentation Problem is the problem of augmenting the edge-connectivity of a given graph by adding links of minimum total cost. This work focuses on connectivity augmentation problems in the Steiner setting, where we are not interested in the connectivity between all nodes of the graph, but only the connectivity between a specified subset of terminals. We consider two related settings. In the Steiner Augmentation of a Graph problem ($k$-SAG), we are given a $k$-edge-connected subgraph $H$ of a graph $G$. The goal is to augment $H$ by including links and nodes from $G$ of minimum cost so that the edge-connectivity between nodes of $H$ increases by 1. In the Steiner Connectivity Augmentation Problem ($k$-SCAP), we are given a Steiner $k$-edge-connected graph connecting terminals $R$, and we seek to add links of minimum cost to create a Steiner $(k+1)$-edge-connected graph for $R$. Note that $k$-SAG is a special case of $k$-SCAP. All of the above problems can be approximated to within a factor of 2 using e.g. Jain's iterative rounding algorithm for Survivable Network Design. In this work, we leverage the framework of Traub and Zenklusen to give a $(1 + \ln{2} +\varepsilon)$-approximation for the Steiner Ring Augmentation Problem (SRAP): given a cycle $H = (V(H),E)$ embedded in a larger graph $G = (V, E \cup L)$ and a subset of terminals $R \subseteq V(H)$, choose a subset of links $S \subseteq L$ of minimum cost so that $(V, E \cup S)$ has 3 pairwise edge-disjoint paths between every pair of terminals. We show this yields a polynomial time algorithm with approximation ratio $(1 + \ln{2} + \varepsilon)$ for $2$-SCAP. We obtain an improved approximation guarantee of $(1.5+\varepsilon)$ for SRAP in the case that $R = V(H)$, which yields a $(1.5+\varepsilon)$-approximation for $k$-SAG for any $k$.