PARAMETERIZED COMPLEXITY OF DIRECTED STEINER TREE ON SPARSE GRAPHS.

We study the parameterized complexity of t he directed variant of the classical STEINER Tree problem on various classes of directed sparse graphs. While the parameterized complexity of STEINER Tree parameterized by the number of terminals is well understood, not much is known about the parameterization by the number of nonterminals in the solution tree. All that is known for this parameterization is that both the directed and the undirected versions are W[2]-hard on general graphs and hence unlikely to be fixed parameter tractable (FPT). The undirected STEINER Tree problem becomes FPT when restricted to sparse classes of graphs such as planar graphs, but the techniques used to show this result break down on directed planar graphs. In this article we precisely chart the tractability border for DIRECTED STEINER Tree (DST) on sparse graphs parameterized by the number of nonterminals in the solution tree. Specifically, we show that the problem is FPT on graphs excluding a topological minor but becomes W[2]-hard on graphs of degeneracy 2. On the other hand we show that if the subgraph induced by the terminals is acyclic, then the problem becomes FPT on graphs of bounded degeneracy. We further show that our algorithm achieves the best possible asymptotic running time dependence on the solution size and degeneracy of the input graph, under standard complexity theoretic assumptions. Using the ideas developed for DST, we also obtain improved algorithms for DOMINATING SET on sparse undirected graphs. These algorithms are asymptotically optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]