Strong Menger Connectedness of Augmented k-ary n-cubes
Abstract 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.