Congestion-Free Rerouting of Flows on DAGs
  Changing a given configuration in a graph into another one is known as a re- configuration problem. Such problems have recently received much interest in the context of algorithmic graph theory. We initiate the theoretical study of the following reconfiguration problem: How to reroute $k$ unsplittable flows of a certain demand in a capacitated network from their current paths to their respective new paths, in a congestion-free manner? This problem finds immediate applications, e.g., in traffic engineering in computer networks. We show that the problem is generally NP-hard already for $k = 2$ flows, which motivates us to study rerouting on a most basic class of flow graphs, namely DAGs. Interestingly, we find that for general $k$, deciding whether an unsplittable multi-commodity flow rerouting schedule exists, is NP-hard even on DAGs. Both NP-hardness proofs are non-trivial. Our main contribution is a polynomial-time (fixed parameter tractable) algorithm to solve the route update problem for a bounded number of flows on DAGs. At the heart of our algorithm lies a novel decomposition of the flow network that allows us to express and resolve reconfiguration dependencies among flows. 
Saeed Akhoondian Amiri, Szymon Dudycz, Stefan Schmid, Sebastian   Wiederrecht
cs.DS cs.CC cs.DM cs.NI math.CO