Strong Menger Connectedness of Augmented k-ary n-cubes

A connected graph $G$ is called strongly Menger (edge) connected if for any two distinct vertices $x,y$ of $G$, there are $\min \{\textrm{deg}_G(x), \textrm{deg}_G(y)\}$ internally disjoint (edge disjoint) paths between $x$ and $y$. Motivated by parallel routing in networks with faults, Oh and Chen (resp., Qiao and Yang) proposed the (fault-tolerant) strong Menger (edge) connectivity as follows. A graph $G$ is called $m$-strongly Menger (edge) connected if $G-F$ remains strongly Menger (edge) connected for an arbitrary vertex set $F\subseteq V(G)$ (resp. edge set $F\subseteq E(G)$) with $|F|\leq m$. A graph $G$ is called $m$-conditional strongly Menger (edge) connected if $G-F$ remains strongly Menger (edge) connected for an arbitrary vertex set $F\subseteq V(G)$ (resp. edge set $F\subseteq E(G)$) with $|F|\leq m$ and $\delta (G-F)\geq 2$. In this paper, we consider strong Menger (edge) connectedness of the augmented $k$-ary $n$-cube $AQ_{n,k}$, which is a variant of $k$-ary $n$-cube $Q_n^k$. By exploring the topological proprieties of $AQ_{n,k}$, we show that $AQ_{n,3}$ (resp. $AQ_{n,k}$, $k\geq 4$) is $(4n-9)$-strongly (resp. $(4n-8)$-strongly) Menger connected for $n\geq 4$ (resp. $n\geq 2$) and $AQ_{n,k}$ is $(4n-4)$-strongly Menger edge connected for $n\geq 2$ and $k\geq 3$. Moreover, we obtain that $AQ_{n,k}$ is $(8n-10)$-conditional strongly Menger edge connected for $n\geq 2$ and $k\geq 3$. These results are all optimal in the sense of the maximum number of tolerated vertex (resp. edge) faults.

Decomposition of complete graphs into stars

A star is a connected graph in which every vertex but one has valency 1. This paper concerns the question of when complete graphs can be decomposed into stars, all of the same order, which have pairwise disjoint edge-sets. It is shown that the complete graphs on rm and rm + 1 vertices, r > 1, can be decomposed into stars with m edges, if and only if r is even or m is odd.