The number of removable edges in a 4-connected graph

Let G be a 4-connected graph. For an edge e of G, we do the following operations on G: first, delete the edge e from G, resulting the graph G−e; second, for all the vertices x of degree 3 in G−e, delete x from G−e and then completely connect the 3 neighbors of x by a triangle. If multiple edges occur, we use single edges to replace them. The final resultant graph is denoted by G⊖e. If G⊖e is still 4-connected, then e is called a removable edge of G. In this paper we prove that every 4-connected graph of order at least six (excluding the 2-cyclic graph of order six) has at least (4|G|+16)/7 removable edges. We also give the structural characterization of 4-connected graphs for which the lower bound is sharp.