Cycles in weighted graphs

A weighted graph is one in which each edgee is assigned a nonnegative numberw(e), called the weight ofe. The weightw(G) of a weighted graphG is the sum of the weights of its edges. In this paper, we prove, as conjectured in [2], that every 2-edge-connected weighted graph onn vertices contains a cycle of weight at least 2w(G)/(n–1). Furthermore, we completely characterize the 2-edge-connected weighted graphs onn vertices that contain no cycle of weight more than 2w(G)/(n–1). This generalizes, to weighted graphs, a classical result of Erds and Gallai [4].