On Kemeny's constant for trees with fixed order and diameter

Abstract

Kemeny's constant $\kappa (G)$ of a connected graph $G$ is a measure of the expected transit time for the random walk associated with $G$. In the current work, we consider the case when $G$ is a tree, and, in this setting, we provide lower and upper bounds for $\kappa (G)$ in terms of the order $n$ and diameter $\delta$ of $G$ by using two different techniques. The lower bound is given as Kemeny's constant of a particular caterpillar tree and, as a consequence, it is sharp. The upper bound is found via induction, by repeatedly removing pendent vertices from $G$. By considering a specific family of trees - the broom-stars - we show that the upper bound is asymptotically sharp.

20 pages, 5 figures