Approximating Fractional Multicommodity Flow

We describe fully polynomial time approximation schemes for various multicommodity flow problems in graphs with m edges and n vertices. We present the first approximation scheme for maximum multicommodity flow that is independent of the number of commodities k, and our algorithm improves upon the runtime of previous algorithms by this factor of k, performing in O^* (\epsilon^{-2} m^2 ) time. For maximum concurrent flow, and minimum cost concurrent flow, we present algorithms that are faster than the current known algorithms when the graph is sparse or the number of commodities k is large, i.e. k ? m=n. Our algorithms build on the framework proposed by Garg and Konemann [4].