Exploring the tractability of the capped hose model

Robust network design concerns the design of networks to support uncertain or varying traffic patterns. An especially important case is the VPN problem, where the total traffic emanating from any node is bounded, but there are no further constraints on the traffic pattern. Recently, Fréchette et al. [10] studied a generalization of the VPN problem where in addition to these socalled hose constraints, there are individual upper bounds on the demands between pairs of nodes. They motivate their model, give some theoretical results, and propose a heuristic algorithm that performs well on real-world instances. Our theoretical understanding of this model is limited; it is APX-hard in general, but tractable when either the hose constraints or the individual demand bounds are redundant. In this work, we uncover further tractable cases of this model; our main result concerns the case where each terminal needs to communicate only with two others. Our algorithms all involve optimally embedding a certain auxiliary graph into the network, and have a connection to a heuristic suggested by Fréchette et al. for the capped hose model in general