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We study the paramereteized complexity of the following connectivity problem. For a vertex subset U of a graph G, trees T_1,...,T_s of G are completely independent spanning trees of U if each of them contains U, and for every two distinct vertices u,v in U, the paths from u to v in T_1,...,T_s are pairwise vertex disjoint except for end-vertices u and v. Then for a given s >= 2 and a parameter k, the task is to decide if a given n-vertex graph G contains a set U of size at least k such that there are s completely independent spanning trees of U. The problem is known to be NP-complete already for s=2. We prove the following results: (*) For s=2 the problem is solvable in time 2^{O(k)}*n^{O(1)}. (*) For s=2 the problem does not admit a polynomial kernel unless NP subseteq coNP/poly. (*) For arbitrary s, we show that the problem is solvable in time f(s,k)n^{O(1)} for some function f of s and k only.
@InProceedings{basavaraju_et_al:LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2014.73,
author = {Basavaraju, Manu and Fomin, Fedor V. and Golovach, Petr A. and Saurabh, Saket},
title = {{Connecting Vertices by Independent Trees}},
booktitle = {34th International Conference on Foundation of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2014)},
pages = {73--84},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-939897-77-4},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2014},
volume = {29},
editor = {Raman, Venkatesh and Suresh, S. P.},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2014.73},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-48340},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2014.73},
annote = {Keywords: Parameterized complexity, FPT-algorithms, completely independent spanning trees}
}