An $O(k^{3} log n)$-Approximation Algorithm for Vertex-Connectivity Survivable Network Design

In the Survivable Network Design problem (SNDP), we are given an undirected graph $G(V,E)$ with costs on edges, along with a connectivity requirement $r(u,v)$ for each pair $u,v$ of vertices. The goal is to find a minimum-cost subset $E^*$ of edges, that satisfies the given set of pairwise connectivity requirements. In the edge-connectivity version we need to ensure that there are $r(u,v)$ edge-disjoint paths for every pair $u, v$ of vertices, while in the vertex-connectivity version the paths are required to be vertex-disjoint. The edge-connectivity version of SNDP is known to have a 2-approximation. However, no non-trivial approximation algorithm has been known so far for the vertex version of SNDP, except for special cases of the problem. We present an extremely simple algorithm to achieve an $O(k^3 \log n)$-approximation for this problem, where $k$ denotes the maximum connectivity requirement, and $n$ denotes the number of vertices. We also give a simple proof of the recently discovered $O(k^2 \log n)$-approximation result for the single-source version of vertex-connectivity SNDP. We note that in both cases, our analysis in fact yields slightly better guarantees in that the $\log n$ term in the approximation guarantee can be replaced with a $\log \tau$ term where $\tau$ denotes the number of distinct vertices that participate in one or more pairs with a positive connectivity requirement.