The K - Constrained Bipartite Matching Problem: Approximation Algorithms and Applications to Wireless Networks

In communication networks, resource assignment problems appear in several different settings. These problems are often modeled by a maximum weight matching problem in bipartite graphs and efficient matching algorithms are well known. In several applications, the corresponding matching problem has to be solved many times in a row as the underlying system operates in a time-slotted fashion and the edge weights change over time. However, changing the assignments can come with a certain cost for reconfiguration that depends on the number of changed edges between subsequent assignments.