On the Complexity of the Regenerator Cost Problem in General Networks with Traffic Grooming

In a communication network one often needs to combine several communication requests into a path in a physical layer of the network. In these cases the cost is measured in terms of the total length of these paths or the total hardware cost of maintaining these paths. In this paper we consider a problem belonging to this general family of optimization problems. We consider the problem of minimizing the number of regenerators in optical networks with traffic grooming. In this problem we are given a network with an underlying topology of a graph G, a set of requests that correspond to paths in G and two positive integers g and d. There is a need to put a regenerator every d edges of every path, because of a degradation in the quality of the signal. Each regenerator can be shared by at most g paths, g being the grooming factor. On the one hand, we show that even in the case of d=1 the problem is APX-hard, i.e. a polynomial time approximation scheme for it does not exist (unless P=NP). On the other hand, we solve such a problem for general G and any d and g, by providing an O(logg)-approximation algorithm and thus extending previous results holding only for specific topologies and specific values of d or g.