Edge-disjoint paths in expanders: online with removals

Abstract: We consider the problem of finding edge-disjoint paths between given pairs of vertices in a sufficiently strong $d$-regular expander graph $G$ with $n$ vertices. In particular, we describe a deterministic, polynomial time algorithm which maintains an initially empty collection of edge-disjoint paths $\mathcal P$ in $G$ and fulfills any series of two types of requests: 1. Given two vertices $a$ and $b$ such that each appears as an endpoint in $O(d)$ paths in $\mathcal P$ and, additionally, $|\mathcal P| = O(n d / \log n)$, the algorithm finds a path of length at most $\log n$ connecting $a$ and $b$ which is edge-disjoint from all other paths in $\mathcal P$, and adds it to $\mathcal P$. 2. Remove a given path $P \in \mathcal{P}$ from $\mathcal{P}$. Importantly, each request is processed before seeing the next one. The upper bound on the length of found paths and the constraints are the best possible up to a constant factor. This establishes the first online algorithm for finding edge-disjoint paths in expanders which also allows removals, significantly strengthening a long list of previous results on the topic.