Maximal Flow in Branching Trees and Binary Search Trees

A capacitated network is a tree with a non negative number, called capacity, associated to each edge. The maximal flow that can pass through a given path is the minimun capacity on the path. Antal and Krapivski (Phys Rev E 74:051110, 2006) study the distribution for the maximal flow from the root to a leaf in the case of a deterministic binary tree with independent and identically distributed random capacities. In this paper their result is extended to three classes of trees with a random number of children and dependent random capacities: binary trees with general capacities distribution, branching trees with exchangeable capacities and random binary search trees.