Generalized 3-edge-connectivity of Cartesian product graphs

Abstract

The generalized k-connectivity κ _k (G) of a graph G was introduced by Chartrand et al. in 1984. As a natural counterpart of this concept, Li et al. in 2011 introduced the concept of generalized k-edge-connectivity which is defined as λ _k (G) = min{λ(S): S ⊆ V (G) and |S| = k}, where λ(S) denotes the maximum number l of pairwise edge-disjoint trees T ₁, T ₂, …, T _l in G such that S ⊆ V (T _i ) for 1 ⩽ i ⩽ l. In this paper we prove that for any two connected graphs G and H we have λ ₃(G □ H) ⩾ λ ₃(G) + λ ₃(H), where G □ H is the Cartesian product of G and H. Moreover, the bound is sharp. We also obtain the precise values for the generalized 3-edge-connectivity of the Cartesian product of some special graph classes.