Maximum Matching in Semi-Streaming with Few Passes

In the semi-streaming model, an algorithm receives a stream of edges of a graph in arbitrary order and uses a memory of size $O(n \mbox{ polylog } n)$, where $n$ is the number of vertices of a graph. In this work, we present semi-streaming algorithms that perform one or two passes over the input stream for maximum matching with no restrictions on the input graph, and for the important special case of bipartite graphs that we refer to as maximum bipartite matching (MBM). The Greedy matching algorithm performs one pass over the input and outputs a $1/2$ approximation. Whether there is a better one-pass algorithm has been an open question since the appearance of the first paper on streaming algorithms for matching problems in 2005 [Feigenbaum et al., SODA 2005]. We make the following progress on this problem: In the one-pass setting, we show that there is a deterministic semi-streaming algorithm for MBM with expected approximation factor $1/2+0.005$, assuming that edges arrive one by one in (uniform) random order. We extend this algorithm to general graphs, and we obtain a $1/2+0.003$ approximation. In the two-pass setting, we do not require the random arrival order assumption (the edge stream is in arbitrary order). We present a simple randomized two-pass semi-streaming algorithm for MBM with expected approximation factor $1/2 + 0.019$. Furthermore, we discuss a more involved deterministic two-pass semi-streaming algorithm for MBM with approximation factor $1/2 + 0.019$ and a generalization of this algorithm to general graphs with approximation factor $1/2 + 0.0071$.