EXTREMAL CAYLEY DIGRAPHS OF FINITE ABELIAN GROUPS

Abstract

Cayley digraphs of finite abelian groups are often used to model communication networks. Because of their applications, extremal Cayley digraphs have been studied extensively in recent years. Given any positive integers d and k. Let m*(d, k) denote the largest positive integer m such that there exists an m-element finite abelian group Γ and a k-element subset A of Γ such that diam ( Cay (Γ, A)) ≤ d, where diam ( Cay (Γ, A)) denotes the diameter of the Cayley digraph Cay (Γ, A) of Γ generated by A. Similarly, let m(d, k) denote the largest positive integer m such that there exists a k-element set A of integers with diam (ℤm, A)) ≤ d. In this paper, we prove, among other results, that [Formula: see text] for all d ≥ 1 and k ≥ 1. This means that the finite abelian group whose Cayley digraph is optimal with respect to its diameter and degree can be a cyclic group.