Tree embeddings for hop-constrained network design

Network design problems aim to compute low-cost structures such as routes, trees and subgraphs. Often, it is natural and desirable to require that these structures have small hop length or hop diameter. Unfortunately, optimization problems with hop constraints are much harder and less well understood than their hop-unconstrained counterparts. A significant algorithmic barrier in this setting is the fact that hop-constrained distances in graphs are very far from being a metric.

We show that, nonetheless, hop-constrained distances can be approximated by distributions over "partial tree metrics." We build this result into a powerful and versatile algorithmic tool which, similarly to classic probabilistic tree embeddings, reduces hop-constrained problems in general graphs to hopunconstrained problems on trees. We then use this tool to give the first poly-logarithmic bicriteria approximations for the hop-constrained variants of many classic network design problems. These include Steiner forest, group Steiner tree, group Steiner forest, buy-at-bulk network design as well as online and oblivious versions of many of these problems.