Random-tree Diameter and the Diameter-constrained MST

A minimum spanning tree (MST) with a small diameter is required in numerous practical situations. It is needed, for example, in distributed mutual exclusion algorithms in order to minimize the number of messages communicated among processors per critical section. Understanding the behavior of tree diameter is useful, for example, in determining an upper bound on the expected number of links between two arbitrary documents on the World Wide Web. The DiameterConstrained MST (DCMST) problem can be stated as follows: given an undirected, edge-weighted graph G with n nodes and a positive integer k, find a spanning tree with the smallest weight among all spanning trees of G which contain no path with more than k edges. This problem is known to be NP-complete, for all values of k; 4 ” k ” n − 2). In this paper, we investigate the behavior of the diameter of MST in randomly-weighted complete graphs (in Erdös-Rényi sense) and explore heuristics for the DCMST problem. For the case when the diameter bound k is small—independent of n, we present a one-time-tree-construction (OTTC) algorithm. It constructs a DCMST in a modified greedy fashion, employing a heuristic for selecting an edge to be added to the tree at each stage of the tree construction. This algorithm is fast and easily parallelizable. We also present a second algorithm that outperforms OTTC for larger values of k. It starts by generating an unconstrained MST and iteratively refines it by replacing edges, one by one, in the middle of long paths in the spanning tree until there is no path left with more than k edges. As expected, the performance of this heuristic is determined by the diameter of the unconstrained MST in the given graph. We discuss convergence, relative merits, and implementation of these heuristics on sequential and parallel machines. Our extensive empirical study shows that these two heuristics produce good solutions for a wide variety of inputs.