Optimal Independent Spanning Trees on Cartesian Product of Hybrid Graphs

A set of k spanning trees rooted at the same vertex r in a graph G is called independent [and the trees are called independent spanning trees (ISTs)] if, for any vertex x ≠ r, the k paths from x to r, one path in each tree, are internally disjoint. The design of ISTs on graphs has applications to fault-tolerant broadcasting and secure message distribution in networks. It was conjectured that, for any k-connected graph, there exist k ISTs rooted at any vertex of the graph. The conjecture has been proved true for k-connected graphs with k ≤ 4, and remains open otherwise. In this paper, we deal with the problem of constructing ISTs on the Cartesian product of a sequence of hybrid graphs, including cycles and complete graphs. Consequently, this result generalizes a number of previous works. Moreover, the construction is shown to be optimal in the sense that the heights of ISTs are minimized.