A near-tight lower bound on the time complexity of distributed MST construction

This paper presents a lower bound of /spl Omega/~(D+/spl radic/n) on the time required for the distributed construction of a minimum-weight spanning tree (MST) in n-vertex networks of diameter D=/spl Omega/(log n), in the bounded message model. This establishes the asymptotic near-optimality of existing time-efficient distributed algorithms for the problem, whose complexity is O(D+/spl radic/nlog* n).