Approximating semi-matchings in streaming and in two-party communication

• Authors: Christian Konrad;Adi Rosén
• Venue: ICALP'13 Proceedings of the 40th international conference on Automata, Languages, and Programming - Volume Part I
• Year: 2013

We study the communication complexity and streaming complexity of approximating unweighted semi-matchings. A semi-matching in a bipartite graph G=(A, B, E), with n=|A|, is a subset of edges S⊆E that matches all A vertices to B vertices with the goal usually being to do this as fairly as possible. While the term semi-matching was coined in 2003 by Harvey et al. [WADS 2003], the problem had already previously been studied in the scheduling literature under different names. We present a deterministic one-pass streaming algorithm that for any 0≤ε≤1 uses space Õ(n1+ε) and computes an O(n(1−ε)/2)-approximation to the semi-matching problem. Furthermore, with o(logn) passes it is possible to compute an O(logn)-approximation with space Õ(n). In the one-way two-party communication setting, we show that for every ε0, deterministic communication protocols for computing an O$(n^{\frac{1}{(1+\epsilon)c + 1}})$-approximation require a message of size more than cn bits. We present two deterministic protocols communicating n and 2n edges that compute an O$(\sqrt{n})$ and an O(n1/3)-approximation respectively. Finally, we improve on results of Harvey et al. [Journal of Algorithms 2006] and prove new links between semi-matchings and matchings. While it was known that an optimal semi-matching contains a maximum matching, we show that there is a hierachical decomposition of an optimal semi-matching into maximum matchings. A similar result holds for semi-matchings that do not admit length-two degree-minimizing paths.