The complexity of minimizing certain cost metrics for k-source spanning trees Original Research Article

We investigate multisource spanning tree problems where, given a graph with edge weights and a subset of the nodes defined as sources, the object is to find a spanning tree of the graph that minimizes some distance-related cost metric. This problem can be used to model multicasting in a network where messages are sent from a fixed collection of senders and communication takes place along the edges of a single spanning tree. For a limited set of possible cost metrics of such a spanning tree, we either prove the problem is NP-hard or we demonstrate the existence of an efficient algorithm to find an optimal tree.