The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

In this talk we generalize the well-known Unsplittable Flow Problem (UFP) and show its applicability to the emerging Network Centric Operations (NCO) concept. While UFP's goal is to maximize the profit gained by accommodating independent flows, our generalization considers dependent flows. In the generalized problem, referred to as the Dependent Unsplittable Flow Problem (D-UFP), the profit from delivering two flows is not necessarily equal to the sum of their profits. We show that in a single channel NCO, D-UFP can be approximated as the Quadratic Knapsack Problem (QKP). We present new algorithms for QKP, and examine their performance in typical NCO scenarios. Our simulation study shows that when the dependency between flows is taken into account, the performance of a typical NCO scenario can increase by 10-100%.