Routing in Undirected Graphs with Constant Congestion

Given an undirected graph G=(V,E), a collection (s1,t1),...,(sk,tk) of k source-sink pairs, and an integer c, the goal in the Edge Disjoint Paths with Congestion problem is to connect maximum possible number of the source-sink pairs by paths, so that the maximum load on any edge (called edge congestion) does not exceed c. We show an efficient randomized algorithm to route $\Omega(OPT/\poly\log k)$ source-sink pairs with congestion at most 14, where OPT is the maximum number of pairs that can be simultaneously routed on edge-disjoint paths. The best previous algorithm that routed $\Omega(OPT/\poly\log n)$ pairs required congestion $\poly(\log \log n)$, and for the setting where the maximum allowed congestion is bounded by a constant c, the best previous algorithms could only guarantee the routing of $OPT/n^{O(1/c)}$ pairs.