A polynomial time approximation scheme for the two-source minimum routing cost spanning trees

Let G be an undirected graph with nonnegative edge lengths. Given two vertices as sources and all vertices as destinations, we investigated the problem how to construct a spanning tree of G such that the sum of distances from sources to destinations is minimum. In the paper, we show the NP-hardness of the problem and present a polynomial time approximation scheme. For any >0, the approximation scheme finds a (1+)-approximation solution in O(n^1/+1) time. We also generalize the approximation algorithm to the weighted case for distances that form a metric space.