Ball-covering property of Banach spaces

We consider the following question: For a Banach spaceX, how many closed balls not containing the origin can cover the sphere of the unit ball? This paper shows that: (1) IfX is smooth and with dimX=n<∞, in particular,X=R ⁿ,then the sphere can be covered byn+1 balls andn+1 is the smallest number of balls forming such a covering. (2) Let Λ be the set of all numbersr>0 satisfying: the unit sphere of every Banach spaceX admitting a ball-covering consisting of countably many balls not containing the origin with radii at mostr impliesX is separable. Then the exact upper bound of Λ is 1 and it cannot be attained. (3) IfX is a Gateaux differentiability space or a locally uniformly convex space, then the unit sphere admits such a countable ball-covering if and only ifX ^* isw ^*-separable.