Geometry and Diameter Bounds of Directed Cayley Graphs of Abelian Groups

Many popular interconnection network topologies, such as hypercubes and toroidal meshes, are based on Cayley graphs of Abelian groups. The symmetry and algebraic structure of these graphs result in many nice physical properties of the network concerning layout, routing algorithms, and load balancing. There has been interest in low-diameter Abelian--Cayley graphs because of their smaller communication delay and reduced congestion. For any fixed number of nodes n, and any fixed out-degree k, we are interested in how small the diameter of directed Cayley graphs of Abelian groups can be and what these low-diameter graphs look like. We give an upper bound of $n \leq \frac{3(d + 3)^3}{25}$ for the size of directed Abelian--Cayley graphs with k = 3 and diameter d, correcting a previously published result by Hsu and Jia [SIAM J. Discrete Math., 7 (1994), pp. 57--71]. Our method is based on translational tiling techniques and is a generalization of Wong and Coppersmith's method for k = 2 [J. Assoc. Comput. Mach., 21 (1974), pp. 392--402]. Moreover, our method works for all Abelian groups, not just the cyclic case. For k = 3 we give computational results for the largest Abelian--Cayley graph as a function of diameter. When n = 84 m3, for integer m, there is a network with $n = \frac{(d + 3)^3}{11.95}$ whose diameter is approximately three-fourths of that of a three-dimensional toroidal cube.