We study the problem of finding small trees. Classical network design problems are considered with the additional constraint that only a specified number $k$ of nodes are required to be connected in the solution. A prototypical example is the $k$MST problem in which we require a tree of minimum weight spanning at least $k$ nodes in an edge-weighted graph. We show that the $k$MST problem is NP-hard even for points in the Euclidean plane. We provide approximation algorithms with performance ratio $2\sqrt{k}$ for the general edge-weighted case and $O(k^{1/4})$ for the case of points in the plane. Polynomial-time exact solutions are also presented for the class of decomposable graphs which includes trees, series-parallel graphs, and bounded bandwidth graphs, and for points on the boundary of a convex region in the Euclidean plane. We also investigate the problem of finding short trees, and more generally, that of finding networks with minimum diameter. A simple technique is used to provide a polynomial-time solution for finding $k$-trees of minimum diameter. We identify easy and hard problems arising in finding short networks using a framework due to T. C. Hu.
For any graph $G$ of order $n$, the spanning tree packing number \emph{$STP(G)$}, is the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees contained in $G$. In this paper, we obtain some sharp lower bounds for the spanning tree numbers of Cartesian product graphs and Lexicographic product graphs.
We classify connected spanning convex subgraphs of the square cycles. We then show that every spanning tree of $C_n^2$ is contained in a unique nontrivial connected spanning convex subgraph of $C_n^2$. As a result, we obtain a purely combinatorial derivation of the formula for the number of spanning trees of the square cycles.
The main purpose of the paper is to develop an approach to evaluation or estimation of the spanning tree congestion of planar graphs. This approach is used to evaluate the spanning tree congestion of triangular grids.
Halin conjectured 20 years ago that a graph has a normal spanning tree if and only if every minor of it has countable colouring number. We prove Halin's conjecture. This implies a forbidden minor characterisation for the property of having a normal spanning tree.
Schmidt characterised the class of rayless graphs by an ordinal rank function, which makes it possible to prove statements about rayless graphs by transfinite induction. Halin asked whether Schmidt's rank function can be generalised to characterise other important classes of graphs. We answer Halin's question in the affirmative. Another largely open problem raised by Halin asks for a characterisation of the class of graphs with an end-faithful spanning tree. A well-studied subclass is formed by the graphs with a normal spanning tree. We determine a larger subclass, the class of normally tracea…
For integer $k\geq2,$ a spanning $k$-ended-tree is a spanning tree with at most $k$ leaves. Motivated by the closure theorem of Broersma and Tuinstra [Independence trees and Hamilton cycles, J. Graph Theory 29 (1998) 227--237], we provide tight spectral conditions to guarantee the existence of a spanning $k$-ended-tree in a connected graph of order $n$ with extremal graphs being characterized. Moreover, by adopting Kaneko's theorem [Spanning trees with constraints on the leaf degree, Discrete Appl. Math. 115 (2001) 73--76], we also present tight spectral conditions for the existence of a spann…
A tree is called k-ended tree if it has at most k leaves, where a leaf is a vertex of degree one. In this paper we prove that every 3-regular connected graph with n vertices such that n is greater than 8 has spanning sub tree with at most [(2n+4)/9]-ended tree. At the end we give a conjecture about spanning k-ended trees on 3-regular connected graphs.
We provide a structural description of, and invariants for, maximum spanning tree-packable graphs, i.e. those graphs G for which the edge connectivity of G is equal to the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees in G. These graphs are of interest for the k-tree protocol of Itai and Rodeh [Inform. and Comput. 79 (1988), 43-59].
Let T1, T2,.... Tk be spanning trees in a graph G. If for any pair of vertices u and v of G, the paths between u and v in every Ti( 0 < i < k+1) do not contain common edges then T1, T2,.... Tk are called edge-disjoint spanning trees in G. The design of multiple edge-disjoint spanning trees has applications to the reliable communication protocols. The n-dimensional augmented cube, denoted as AQn, a variation of the hypercube, possesses some properties superior to those of the hypercube. For AQn (n > 2), construction of n-1 edge-disjoint spanning trees is given the result is optimal with respect…
The weighted spanning tree enumerator of a graph $G$ with weighted edges is the sum of the products of edge weights over all the spanning trees in $G$. In the special case that all of the edge weights equal $1$, the weighted spanning tree enumerator counts the number of spanning trees in $G$. The Weighted Matrix-Tree Theorem asserts that the weighted spanning tree enumerator can be calculated from the determinant of a reduced weighted Laplacian matrix of $G$. That determinant, however, is not always easy to compute. In this paper, we show how two well-known results from linear algebra, the Mat…
This note derives the characteristic polynomial of a graph that represents nonjump moves in a generalized game of checkers. The number of spanning trees is also determined.
A spanning tree without a vertex of degree two is called a Hist which is an abbreviation for homeomorphically irreducible spanning tree. We provide a necessary condition for the existence of a Hist in a cubic graph. As one consequence, we answer affirmatively an open question on Hists by Albertson, Berman, Hutchinson and Thomassen.
A 2-tree is a graph that can be formed by starting with a triangle and iterating the operation of making a new vertex adjacent to two adjacent vertices of the existing graph. Leizhen Cai asked in 1995 whether every maximal planar graph contains a spanning 2-tree. We answer this question in the negative by constructing an infinite class of maximal planar graphs that have no spanning 2-tree.
Completely independent spanning trees in a graph $G$ are spanning trees of $G$ such that for any two distinct vertices of $G$, the paths between them in the spanning trees are pairwise edge-disjoint and internally vertex-disjoint. In this paper, we present a tight lower bound on the maximum number of completely independent spanning trees in $L(G)$, where $L(G)$ denotes the line graph of a graph $G$. Based on a new characterization of a graph with $k$ completely independent spanning trees, we also show that for any complete graph $K_n$ of order $n \geq 4$, there are $\lfloor \frac{n+1}{2} \rflo…
Albertson, Berman, Hutchinson, and Thomassen showed in 1990 that there exist highly connected graphs in which every spanning tree contains vertices of degree 2. Using a result of Alon and Wormald, we show that there exists a natural number $d$ such that every graph of minimum degree at least $d$ contains a spanning tree without adjacent vertices of degree 2. Moreover, we prove that every graph with minimum degree at least 3 has a spanning tree without three consecutive vertices of degree 2.
In the present paper we consider the problem of constructing all the projective rooted spanning trees of a given graph. We propose an algorithm based on reducing this problem to the problem of constructing all the maximal independent sets of a certain derived graph. We also offer an algorithm for step-by-step growing the spanning trees that sifts, at each step, any sub-trees non-extendable to projective spanning trees. The proposed algorithms were applied for analyzing the possible variants of the syntactic subordination of nouns through prepositions .
A tree with at most $k$ leaves is called a $k$-ended tree. A spanning 2-ended tree is a Hamilton path. A Hamilton cycle can be considered as a spanning 1-ended tree. The earliest result concerning spanning trees with few leaves states that if $k$ is a positive integer and $G$ is a connected graph of order $n$ with $d(x)+d(y)\ge n-k+1$ for each pair of nonadjacent vertices $x,y$, then $G$ has a spanning $k$-ended tree. In this paper, we improve this result in two ways, and an analogous result is proved for dominating $k$-ended trees based on the generalized parameter $t_k$ - the order of a larg…
We consider the number of spanning trees in circulant graphs of $βn$ vertices with generators depending linearly on $n$. The matrix tree theorem gives a closed formula of $βn$ factors, while we derive a formula of $β-1$ factors. Using the same trick, we also derive a formula for the number of spanning trees in discrete tori. Moreover, the spanning tree entropy of circulant graphs with fixed and non-fixed generators is compared.
We present two short proofs for Diestel's criterion that a connected graph has a normal spanning tree provided it contains no subdivision of a countable clique in which every edge has been replaced by uncountably many parallel edges.
We prove a refinement of the tree packing theorem by Tutte/Nash-Williams for finite graphs. This result is used to obtain a similar result for end faithful spanning tree packings in certain infinite graphs and consequently to establish a sufficient Hamiltonicity condition for the line graphs of such graphs.
In this paper we study the flow-property of graphs containing a spanning triangle-tree. Our main results provide a structure characterization of graphs with a spanning triangle-tree admitting a nowhere-zero $3$-flow. All these graphs without nowhere-zero $3$-flows are constructed from $K_4$ by a so-called bull-growing operation. This generalizes a result of Fan et al. in 2008 on triangularly-connected graphs and particularly shows that every $4$-edge-connected graph with a spanning triangle-tree has a nowhere-zero $3$-flow. A well-known classical theorem of Jaeger in 1979 shows that every grap…
We give a proof for sharp estimate for the number of spanning trees using linear algebra and generalize this bound to multigraphs. In addition, we show that this bound is tight for complete graphs. In addition, we give estimates for number of spanning trees in specific type of graphs such as product of graphs or Cartesian product of two graphs.
In this short note, we study pairwise edge-disjoint rainbow spanning trees in properly edge-coloured complete graphs, where a graph is rainbow if its edges have distinct colours. Brualdi and Hollingsworth conjectured that every $K_n$ properly edge-coloured by $n-1$ colours has $n/2$ edge-disjoint rainbow spanning trees. Kaneko, Kano and Suzuki later suggested this should hold for every properly edge-coloured $K_n$. Improving the previous best known bound, we show that every properly edge-coloured $K_n$ contains $Ω(n)$ pairwise edge-disjoint rainbow spanning trees. Independently, Pokrovskiy and…
A spanning tree of a properly edge-colored complete graph, $K_n$, is rainbow provided that each of its edges receives a distinct color. In 1996, Brualdi and Hollingsworth conjectured that if $K_{2m}$ is properly $(2m-1)$-edge-colored, then the edges of $K_{2m}$ can be partitioned into $m$ rainbow spanning trees except when $m=2$. By means of an explicit, constructive approach, in this paper we construct $\lfloor \sqrt{6m+9}/3 \rfloor$ mutually edge-disjoint rainbow spanning trees for any positive value of $m$. Not only are the rainbow trees produced, but also some structure of each rainbow spa…
We show that a graph $G$ has a normal spanning tree if and only if its vertex set is the union of countably many sets each separated from any subdivided infinite clique in $G$ by a finite set of vertices. This proves a conjecture by Brochet and Diestel from 1994, giving a common strengthening of two classical normal spanning tree criterions due to Jung and Halin. Moreover, our method gives a new, algorithmic proof of Halin's theorem that every connected graph not containing a subdivision of a countable clique has a normal spanning tree.
Random spanning trees of a graph $G$ are governed by a corresponding probability mass distribution (or "law"), $μ$, defined on the set of all spanning trees of $G$. This paper addresses the problem of choosing $μ$ in order to utilize the edges as "fairly" as possible. This turns out to be equivalent to minimizing, with respect to $μ$, the expected overlap of two independent random spanning trees sampled with law $μ$. In the process, we introduce the notion of homogeneous graphs. These are graphs for which it is possible to choose a random spanning tree so that all edges have equal usage probab…
The Ferrers bound conjecture is a natural graph-theoretic extension of the enumeration of spanning trees for Ferrers graphs. We document the current status of the conjecture and provide a further conjecture which implies it.
Let T1, T2,..., Tk be spanning trees in a graph G. If for any pair of vertices {u, v} of G, the paths between u and v in every Ti( 0 < i < k+1) do not contain common edges and common vertices, except the vertices u and v, then T1, T2,..., Tk are called completely independent spanning trees in G. The n-dimensional augmented cube, denoted as AQn, a variation of the hypercube possesses several embeddable properties that the hypercube and its variations do not possess. For AQn (n > 5), construction of 4 completely independent spanning trees of which two trees with diameters 2n - 5 and two trees wi…
We give a Cayley type formula to count the number of spanning trees in the complete r-uniform hypergraph for all r >= 3. Similar to the bijection between spanning trees in complete graphs and Parking functions, we derive a bijection from spanning trees of the complete (r+1)-uniform hypergraph which arise from a fixed r-perfect matching and r-Parking functions. We observe a simple consequence of this bijection in terms of the number of regions of the extended Shi arrangement.
We prove a Matrix-Tree Theorem enumerating the spanning trees of a cell complex in terms of the eigenvalues of its cellular Laplacian operators, generalizing a previous result for simplicial complexes. As an application, we obtain explicit formulas for spanning tree enumerators and Laplacian eigenvalues of cubes; the latter are integers. We prove a weighted version of the eigenvalue formula, providing evidence for a conjecture on weighted enumeration of cubical spanning trees. We introduce a cubical analogue of shiftedness, and obtain a recursive formula for the Laplacian eigenvalues of shifte…
We consider all spanning trees of a complete simple graph $Γ$ on $n$ vertices that contain a given $m-$forest $F$. We show that the number of such spanning trees, $τ(F)$, doesn't depend on the structure of $F$ and is completely determined by the number of vertices $q_i \, (i=1, ..., m)$ in each connected component of $F$. Specifically, $τ(F) = q_1 q_2 \cdots q_m n^{m-2}$.
In this paper, we derive closed-form formulas for Kirchhoff index and Wiener index of linear pentagonal cylinder graph and linear pentagonal Mobius chain graph. We also obtain explicit formulas for finding total number of spanning trees for both the graphs.
In this paper we construct spanning trees in hyperbolic graphs that represent their hyperbolic compactification in a good way: so that the tree has a bounded number of distinct rays to each boundary point. The bound depends only on the (Assouad) dimension of the boundary. As a corollary we sharpen a result of Gromov which says that from every hyperbolic graph with bounded degrees one can construct a tree outside the graph with a continuous surjection from the ends of the tree onto the hyperbolic boundary such that the surjection is finite-to-one. We will construct a tree with these properties …
We prove that if a tree $T$ has $n$ vertices and maximum degree at most $Δ$, then a copy of $T$ can almost surely be found in the random graph $\mathcal{G}(n,Δ\log^5 n/n)$.
It is well-known that the number of spanning trees, denoted by $τ(G)$, in a connected multi-graph $G$ can be calculated by the Matrix-Tree theorem and Tutte's deletion-contraction theorem. In this short note, we find an alternate method to compute $τ(G)$ by degrees of vertices.
In this article, we extend Moon's classic formula for counting spanning trees in complete graphs containing a fixed spanning forest to complete bipartite graphs. Let $(X,Y)$ be the bipartition of the complete bipartite graph $K_{m,n}$ with $|X|=m$ and $|Y|=n$. We prove that for any given spanning forest $F$ of $K_{m,n}$ with components $T_1,T_2,\ldots,T_k$, the number of spanning trees in $K_{m,n}$ which contain all edges in $F$ is equal to $$ \frac 1{mn}\left(\prod_{i=1}^k (m_in+n_im)\right) \left (1-\sum_{i=1}^{k}\frac{m_in_i}{m_in+n_im}\right ), $$ where $m_i=|V(T_i)\cap X|$ and $n_i=|V(T_i…
The number of spanning trees in a class of directed circulant graphs with generators depending linearly on the number of vertices $βn$, and in the $n$-th and $(n-1)$-th power graphs of the $βn$-cycle are evaluated as a product of $\lceilβ/2\rceil-1$ terms.
Let $G$ be a cubic graph which has a decomposition into a spanning tree $T$ and a $2$-regular subgraph $C$, i.e. $E(T) \cup E(C) = E(G)$ and $E(T) \cap E(C) = \emptyset$. We provide an answer to the following question: which lengths can the cycles of $C$ have if $G$ is a snark? Note that $T$ is a hist (i.e. a spanning tree without a vertex of degree two) and that every cubic graph with a hist has the above decomposition.
We give two combinatorial proofs of an elegant product formula for the number of spanning trees of the $n$-dimensional hypercube. The first proof is based on the assertion that if one chooses a uniformly random rooted spanning tree of the hypercube and orient each edge from parent to child, then the parallel edges of the hypercube get orientations which are independent of one another. This independence property actually holds in a more general context and has intriguing consequences. The second proof uses some "killing involutions" in order to identify the factors in the product formula. It le…
We consider questions related to the existence of spanning trees in graphs with the property that after the removal of any path in the tree the graph remains connected. We show that, for planar graphs, the existence of trees with this property is closely related to the Hamiltonicity of the graph. For graphs with a 1- or 2-vertex cut, the Hamiltonicity also plays a central role. We also deal with spanning trees satisfying this property restricted to paths arising from fundamental cycles. The cycle space of a graph can be generated by the fundamental cycles of any spanning tree, and Tutte showed…
Let A_n (n >= 1) be the set of all integers x such that there exists a connected graph on n vertices with precisely x spanning trees. In this paper, we show that |A_n| grows faster than sqrt{n}exp(2Pi*sqrt{n/log{n}/Sqrt(3)} This settles a question of Sedlacek.
