Packing spanning trees and the $k$-tree protocol

We provide a structural description of, and invariants for, maximum spanning tree-packable graphs, i.e. those graphs G for which the edge connectivity of G is equal to the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees in G. These graphs are of interest for the k-tree protocol of Itai and Rodeh [Inform. and Comput. 79 (1988), 43-59].