Extremal trees with respect to the Steiner Wiener index

The well-known Wiener index is defined as the sum of pairwise distances between vertices. Extremal problems with respect to it have been extensively studied for trees. A generalization of the Wiener index, called the Steiner Wiener index, takes the sum of minimum sizes of subgraphs that span k given vertices over all possible choices of the k vertices. We consider the extremal problems with respect to the Steiner Wiener index among trees of a given degree sequence. First, it is pointed out minimizing the Steiner Wiener index in general may be a difficult problem, although the extremal structure may very likely be the same as that for the regular Wiener index. We then consider the upper bound of the general Steiner Wiener index among trees of a given degree sequence and study the corresponding extremal trees. With these findings, some further discussion and computational analysis are presented for chemical trees. We also propose a conjecture based on the computational results. In addition, we identify the extremal trees that maximize the Steiner Wiener index among trees with a given maximum degree or number of leaves.