On strong Menger-connectivity of star graphs Original Research Article

Motivated by parallel routing in networks with faults, we study the following graph theoretical problem. Let G be a graph of minimum vertex degree d. We say that G is strongly Menger-connected if for any copy Gf of G with at most d−2 nodes removed, every pair of nodes u and v in Gf are connected by min{degf(u),degf(v)} node-disjoint paths in Gf, where degf(u) and degf(v) are the degrees of the nodes u and v in Gf, respectively. We show that the star graphs, which are a recently proposed attractive alternative to the widely used hypercubes as network models, are strongly Menger-connected. An algorithm of optimal running time is developed that constructs the maximum number of node-disjoint paths of nearly optimal length in star graphs with faults.