Given an n-vertex graph G, a drawing of G in the plane is a mapping of its vertices into points of the plane, and its edges into continuous curves, connecting the images of their endpoints. A crossing in such a drawing is a point where two such curves intersect. In the Minimum Crossing Number problem, the goal is to find a drawing of G with minimum number of crossings. The value of the optimal solution, denoted by OPT, is called the graphs crossing number. This is a very basic problem in topological graph theory, that has received a significant amount of attention, but is still poorly understood algorithmically. The best currently known efficient algorithm produces drawings with $O(log^2 n)(n + OPT)$ crossings on bounded-degree graphs, while only a constant factor hardness of approximation is known. A closely related problem is Minimum Edge Planarization, in which the goal is to remove a minimum-cardinality subset of edges from G, such that the remaining graph is planar. Our main technical result establishes the following connection between the two problems: if we are given a solution of cost k to the Minimum Edge Planarization problem on graph G, then we can efficiently find a drawing of G with at most $poly(d)cdot kcdot (k+OPT)$ crossings, where $d$ is the maximum degree in G. This result implies an $O(ncdot poly(d)cdot log^{3/2}n)$-approximation for Minimum Crossing Number, as well as improved algorithms for special cases of the problem, such as, for example, k-apex and bounded-genus graphs.
In the Survivable Network Design problem (SNDP), we are given an undirected graph $G(V,E)$ with costs on edges, along with a connectivity requirement $r(u,v)$ for each pair $u,v$ of vertices. The goal is to find a minimum-cost subset $E^*$ of edges, that satisfies the given set of pairwise connectivity requirements. In the edge-connectivity version we need to ensure that there are $r(u,v)$ edge-disjoint paths for every pair $u, v$ of vertices, while in the vertex-connectivity version the paths are required to be vertex-disjoint. The edge-connectivity version of SNDP is known to have a 2-approximation. However, no non-trivial approximation algorithm has been known so far for the vertex version of SNDP, except for special cases of the problem. We present an extremely simple algorithm to achieve an $O(k^3 log n)$-approximation for this problem, where $k$ denotes the maximum connectivity requirement, and $n$ denotes the number of vertices. We also give a simple proof of the recently discovered $O(k^2 log n)$-approximation result for the single-source version of vertex-connectivity SNDP. We note that in both cases, our analysis in fact yields slightly better guarantees in that the $log n$ term in the approximation guarantee can be replaced with a $log tau$ term where $tau$ denotes the number of distinct vertices that participate in one or more pairs with a positive connectivity requirement.
