The Undirected Optical Indices of Trees

For a connected graph $G$, an instance $I$ is a set of pairs of vertices and a corresponding routing $R$ is a set of paths specified for all vertex-pairs in $I$. Let $\mathfrak{R}_I$ be the collection of all routings with respect to $I$. The undirected optical index of $G$ with respect to $I$ refers to the minimum integer $k$ to guarantee the existence of a mapping $\phi:R\to\{1,2,\ldots,k\}$, such that $\phi(P)\neq\phi(P')$ if $P$ and $P'$ have common edge(s), over all routings $R\in\mathfrak{R}_I$. A natural lower bound of the undirected optical index is the edge-forwarding index, which is defined to be the minimum of the maximum edge-load over all possible routings. Let $w(G,I)$ and $\pi(G,I)$ denote the undirected optical index and edge-forwarding index with respect to $I$, respectively. In this paper, we derive the inequality $w(T,I_A)<\frac{3}{2}\pi(T,I_A)$ for any tree $T$, where $I_A:=\{\{x,y\}:\,x,y\in V(T)\}$ is the all-to-all instance.