Decompositions of some regular graphs into unicyclic graphs of order five

Abstract

For a graph [Formula: see text] and a subgraph [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] an [Formula: see text]-decomposition of [Formula: see text] is a partition of the edge set of [Formula: see text] into subsets [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] such that each [Formula: see text] induces a graph isomorphic to [Formula: see text] It is proved that the necessary conditions are sufficient for the existence of an [Formula: see text]-decomposition of the graph [Formula: see text] where [Formula: see text] is any simple connected unicyclic graph of order five, × denotes the tensor product of graphs and [Formula: see text] denotes the multiplicity of the edges. In fact, using the above characterization, a necessary and sufficient condition for the graph [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] to admit an [Formula: see text]-decomposition is obtained. Similar results for the complete graphs and complete multipartite graphs are proved in: [J.-C. Bermond et al. [Formula: see text]-decomposition of [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] has four vertices or less, Discrete Math. 19 (1977) 113–120, J.-C. Bermond et al. Decomposition of complete graphs into isomorphic subgraphs with five verices, Ars Combin. 10 (1980) 211–254, M. H. Huang, Decomposing complete equipartite graphs into connected unicyclic graphs of size five, Util. Math. 97 (2015) 109–117].