Single-sink Fractionally Subadditive Network Design

Abstract: We study a generalization of the Steiner tree problem, where we are given a weighted network $G$ together with a collection of $k$ subsets of its vertices and a root $r$. We wish to construct a minimum cost network such that the network supports one unit of flow to the root from every node in a subset simultaneously. The network constructed does not need to support flows from all the subsets simultaneously. We settle an open question regarding the complexity of this problem for $k=2$, and give a $\frac{3}{2}$-approximation algorithm that improves over a (trivial) known 2-approximation. Furthermore, we prove some structural results that prevent many well-known techniques from doing better than the known $O(\log n)$-approximation. Despite these obstacles, we conjecture that this problem should have an $O(1)$-approximation. We also give an approximation result for a variant of the problem where the solution is required to be a path.