On embeddings of CAT(0) cube complexes into products of trees

We prove that the contact graph of a 2-dimensional CAT(0) cube complex ${\bf X}$ of maximum degree $\Delta$ can be coloured with at most $\epsilon(\Delta)=M\Delta^{26}$ colours, for a fixed constant $M$. This implies that ${\bf X}$ (and the associated median graph) isometrically embeds in the Cartesian product of at most $\epsilon(\Delta)$ trees, and that the event structure whose domain is ${\bf X}$ admits a nice labeling with $\epsilon(\Delta)$ labels. On the other hand, we present an example of a 5-dimensional CAT(0) cube complex with uniformly bounded degrees of 0-cubes which cannot be embedded into a Cartesian product of a finite number of trees. This answers in the negative a question raised independently by F. Haglund, G. Niblo, M. Sageev, and the first author of this paper.Comment: Some small corrections; main change is a correction of the computation of the bounds in Theorem 1. Some figures repaire

Forwarding and optical indices of 4-regular circulant networks

An all-to-all routing in a graph $G$ is a set of oriented paths of $G$, with exactly one path for each ordered pair of vertices. The load of an edge under an all-to-all routing $R$ is the number of times it is used (in either direction) by paths of $R$, and the maximum load of an edge is denoted by $\pi(G,R)$. The edge-forwarding index $\pi(G)$ is the minimum of $\pi(G,R)$ over all possible all-to-all routings $R$, and the arc-forwarding index $\overrightarrow{\pi}(G)$ is defined similarly by taking direction into consideration, where an arc is an ordered pair of adjacent vertices. Denote by $w(G,R)$ the minimum number of colours required to colour the paths of $R$ such that any two paths having an edge in common receive distinct colours. The optical index $w(G)$ is defined to be the minimum of $w(G,R)$ over all possible $R$, and the directed optical index $\overrightarrow{w}(G)$ is defined similarly by requiring that any two paths having an arc in common receive distinct colours. In this paper we obtain lower and upper bounds on these four invariants for $4$-regular circulant graphs with connection set $\{\pm 1,\pm s\}$, $1<s<n/2$. We give approximation algorithms with performance ratio a small constant for the corresponding forwarding index and routing and wavelength assignment problems for some families of $4$-regular circulant graphs.Comment: 19 pages, no figure in Journal of Discrete Algorithms 201