Approximation algorithms for the shortest total path length spanning tree problem Original Research Article

Given an undirected graph with a nonnegative weight on each edge, the shortest total path length spanning tree problem is to find a spanning tree of the graph such that the total path length summed over all pairs of the vertices is minimized. In this paper, we present several approximation algorithms for this problem. Our algorithms achieve approximation ratios of 2, 15/8, and 3/2 in time O(n2+f(G)), O(n3), and O(n4) respectively, in which f(G) is the time complexity for computing all-pairs shortest paths of the input graph G and n is the number of vertices of G. Furthermore, we show that the approximation ratio of (4/3+ε) can be achieved in polynomial time for any constant ε>0.