Improved Approximability and Non-approximability Results for Graph Diameter Decreasing Problems

In this paper we study two variants of the problem of adding edges to a graph so as to reduce the resulting diameter. More precisely, given a graph G = (V,E), and two positive integers D and B, the Minimum-Cardinality Bounded-Diameter Edge Addition (MCBD) problem is to find a minimum cardinality set F of edges to be added to G in such a way that the diameter of G + F is less than or equal to D, while the Bounded-Cardinality Minimum-Diameter Edge Addition (BCMD) problem is to find a set F of B edges to be added to G in such a way that the diameter of G + F is minimized. Both problems are well known to be NP-hard, as well as approximable within O(logn logD) and 4 (up to an additive term of 2), respectively. In this paper, we improve these long-standing approximation ratios to O(logn) and to 2 (up to an additive term of 2), respectively. As a consequence, we close, in an asymptotic sense, the gap on the approximability of the MCBD problem, which was known to be not approximable within c logn, for some constant c > 0, unless P=NP. Remarkably, as we further show in the paper, our approximation ratio remains asymptotically tight even if we allow for a solution whose diameter is optimal up to a multiplicative factor approaching 5/3. On the other hand, on the positive side, we show that at most twice of the minimal number of additional edges suffices to get at most twice of the required diameter.