New parameterized algorithms for edge dominating set

An edge dominating set of a graph G=(V,E) is a subset M of edges in the graph such that each edge in E-M is incident with at least one edge in M. In an instance of the parameterized edge dominating set problem we are given a graph G=(V,E) and an integer k and we are asked to decide whether G has an edge dominating set of size at most k. In this paper we show that the parameterized edge dominating set problem can be solved in O^*(2.3147^k) time and polynomial space. We show that this problem can be reduced to a quadratic kernel with O(k^3) edges.