We demonstrate that the integrality gap of the natural cut-based LP relaxation for the directed Steiner tree problem is $O(\log k)$ in quasi-bipartite graphs with $k$ terminals. Such instances can be seen to generalize set cover, so the integrality gap analysis is tight up to a constant factor. A novel aspect of our approach is that we use the primal-dual method; a technique that is rarely used in designing approximation algorithms for network design problems in directed graphs.
Categories: cs.DS