Approximating the minimum weight weak vertex cover

Accurate network flow measurement is important for a variety of network applications, where the "flow" over an edge in the network is intuitively the rate of data traffic. The problem of efficiently monitoring the network flow can be regarded as finding the minimum weight weak vertex cover for a given graph. In this paper, we present a (2 - frac(2, ν (G)))-approximation algorithm solving for this problem, which improves previous results, where ν (G) is the cyclomatic number of G. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.