Diameter of Cayley graphs of permutation groups generated by transposition trees

Let $\Gamma$ be a Cayley graph of the permutation group generated by a transposition tree $T$ on $n$ vertices. In an oft-cited paper \cite{Akers:Krishnamurthy:1989} (see also \cite{Hahn:Sabidussi:1997}), it is shown that the diameter of the Cayley graph $\Gamma$ is bounded as \diam(\Gamma) \le \max_{\pi \in S_n}{c(\pi)-n+\sum_{i=1}^n \dist_T(i,\pi(i))}, where the maximization is over all permutations $\pi$, $c(\pi)$ denotes the number of cycles in $\pi$, and \dist_T is the distance function in $T$. In this work, we first assess the performance (the sharpness and strictness) of this upper bound. We show that the upper bound is sharp for all trees of maximum diameter and also for all trees of minimum diameter, and we exhibit some families of trees for which the bound is strict. We then show that for every $n$, there exists a tree on $n$ vertices, such that the difference between the upper bound and the true diameter value is at least $n-4$. Observe that evaluating this upper bound requires on the order of $n!$ (times a polynomial) computations. We provide an algorithm that obtains an estimate of the diameter, but which requires only on the order of (polynomial in) $n$ computations; furthermore, the value obtained by our algorithm is less than or equal to the previously known diameter upper bound. This result is possible because our algorithm works directly with the transposition tree on $n$ vertices and does not require examining any of the permutations (only the proof requires examining the permutations). For all families of trees examined so far, the value $\beta$ computed by our algorithm happens to also be an upper bound on the diameter, i.e. \diam(\Gamma) \le \beta \le \max_{\pi \in S_n}{c(\pi)-n+\sum_{i=1}^n \dist_T(i,\pi(i))}.Comment: This is an extension of arXiv:1106.535

Optimal Sequential Gossiping by Short Messages

International audienceGossiping is the process of information di ffusion in which each node of a network holds a block that must be communicated to all the other nodes in the network. We consider the problem of gossiping in communication networks under the restriction that communicating nodes can exchange up to a fixed number p of blocks during each call. We study the minimum numbers of call necessary to perform gossiping among n processor for any arbitrary fixed upper bound on the message size p

Gossiping in Cayley Graphs by Packets

. Gossiping (also called total exchange or all-to-all communication) is the process of information diffusion in which each node of a network holds a packet that must be communicated to all other nodes in the network. We consider here gossiping in the store-and-forward, fullduplex and \Delta-port (or shouting) model. In such a model, the protocol consists of a sequence of rounds and during each round, each node can send (and receive) messages from all its neighbors. The great majority of the previous works on gossiping problems allows the messages to be freely concatenated and so messages of arbitrary length can be transmitted during a round. Here we restrict the problem to the case where at each round communicating nodes can exchange exactly one packet. We give a lower bound of N \Gamma1 ffi , where ffi is the minimum degree, and show that it is attained in Cayley symmetric digraphs with some additional properties. That implies the existence of an optimal gossiping protocol for clas..