Bottleneck spanning tree A bottleneck spanning tree T of

Chapter 23, Problem 23-3

(choose chapter or problem)

Bottleneck spanning tree A bottleneck spanning tree T of an undirected graph G is a spanning tree of G whose largest edge weight is minimum over all spanning trees of G. We say that the value of the bottleneck spanning tree is the weight of the maximum-weight edge in T . a. Argue that a minimum spanning tree is a bottleneck spanning tree. Part (a) shows that finding a bottleneck spanning tree is no harder than finding a minimum spanning tree. In the remaining parts, we will show how to find a bottleneck spanning tree in linear time. b. Give a linear-time algorithm that given a graph G and an integer b, determines whether the value of the bottleneck spanning tree is at most b. c. Use your algorithm for part (b) as a subroutine in a linear-time algorithm for the bottleneck-spanning-tree problem. (Hint: You may want to use a subroutine that contracts sets of edges, as in the MST-REDUCE procedure described in 23-2.)