The goal for the Directed Steiner Tree problem is to find a minimum cost tree
in a directed graph G=(V,E) that connects all terminals X to a given root r. It
is well known that modulo a logarithmic factor it suffices to consider acyclic
graphs where the nodes are arranged in L <= log |X| levels. Unfortunately the
natural LP formulation has a |X|^(1/2) integrality gap already for 5 levels. We
show that for every L, the O(L)-round Lasserre Strengthening of this LP has
integrality gap O(L log |X|). This provides a polynomial time
|X|^{epsilon}-approximation and a O(log^3 |X|) approximation in O(n^{log |X|)
time, matching the best known approximation guarantee obtained by a greedy
algorithm of Charikar et al.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figur