An Improved Upper Bound for the Ring Loading Problem

The ring loading problem emerged in the 1990s to model an important special case of telecommunication networks (synchronous optical network rings) which gained attention from practitioners and theorists alike. Given an undirected cycle on $n$ nodes together with nonnegative demands between any pair of nodes, the ring loading problem asks for an unsplittable routing of the demands such that the maximum cumulated demand on any edge is minimized. Let $L$ be the value of such a solution. In the relaxed version of the problem, each demand can be split into two parts where the first part is routed clockwise while the second part is routed counterclockwise. Denote with $L^*$ the maximum load of a minimum split routing solution. In a landmark paper, Schrijver, Seymour, and Winkler [SIAM J. Discrete Math., 11 (1998), pp. 1--14] showed that $L \leq L^* + \frac{3}{2}D$, where $D$ is the maximum demand value. They also found (implicitly) an instance of the ring loading problem with $L = L^* + \frac{101}{100}D$. Recently, Skutella [SIAM J. Discrete Math., 30 (2016), pp. 327--342] improved these bounds by showing that $L \leq L^* + \frac{19}{14}D$, and there exists an instance with $L = L^* + \frac{11}{10}D$. We contribute to this line of research by showing that $L \leq L^* + \frac{13}{10}D$. We also take a first step toward lower and upper bounds for small instances.