The full Steiner tree problem

Abstract

Motivated by the reconstruction of phylogenetic tree in biology, we study the full Steiner tree problem in this paper. Given a complete graph G = (V,E) with a length function on E and a proper subset R ⊂ V, the problem is to find a full Steiner tree of minimum length in G, which is a kind of Steiner tree with all the vertices of R as its leaves. In this paper, we show that this problem is NP-complete and MAX SNP-hard, even when the lengths of the edges are restricted to either 1 or 2. For the instances with lengths either 1 or 2, we give a 8/5-approximation algorithm to find an approximate solution for the problem. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.