LP-Based Approximation Algorithms for Facility Location in Buy-at-Bulk Network Design

Abstract

We study problems that integrate buy-at-bulk network design into the classical (connected) facility location problem. In such problems, we need to open facilities, build a routing network, and route every client demand to an open facility. Furthermore, capacities of the edges can be purchased in discrete units from K different cable types with costs that satisfy economies of scale. We extend the linear programming framework of Talwar [IPCO 2002] for the single-source buy-at-bulk problem to these variants and prove integrality gap upper bounds for both facility location and connected facility location buy-at-bulk problems. For the unconnected variant we prove an integrality gap bound of O(K), and for the connected version, we get an improved bound of O(1).