Multicommodity Flows in Planar Graphs with Demands on Faces

Abstract

We consider the problem of multicommodity flows in planar graphs. Seymour [Seymour, 1981] showed that if the union of supply and demand graphs is planar, then the cut condition is also sufficient for routing demands. Okamura-Seymour [Okamura and Seymour, 1981] showed that if the supply graph is planar and all demands are incident on one face, then again the cut condition is sufficient for routing demands. We consider a common generalization of these settings where the end points of each demand are on the same face of the planar graph. We show that if the source sink pairs on each face of the graph are such that sources and sinks appear contiguously on the cycle bounding the face, then the flow cut gap is at most 3. We come up with a notion of approximating demands on a face by convex combination of laminar demands to prove this result.