2014 IEEE 34th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops

Cayley-Graph-based Data Centers and Space Requirements of a Routing Scheme

using Automata
Miguel Camelo, Pere Vil`a and
Llus F`abrega
Institut dInform`atica i Aplicacions
Universitat de Girona, Girona, Spain
Email: {miguel.camelo, pere.vila, lluis.fabrega}@udg.edu

Dimitri Papadimitriou
Alcatel-Lucent Bell
Antwerpen, Belgium
Email: dimitri.papadimitriou@alcatel-lucent.com

AbstractModern data centers connect tens of thousands of

computers by an interconnection network. The design of such
networks implies the selection of an appropriate routing scheme
for them. Those schemes need to be efcient with respect to
time and space requirements. Cayley Graphs (CG) has been
proposed as models for large-scale interconnection networks
with excellent properties and very efcient routing schemes.
In a previous work, we presented a fast general-purpose
shortest path routing scheme for CG with compact routing
tables. The scheme uses the concept the Automatic Structures
(AS) of a group. However, the size of such structures was not
considered into the complexity analysis. Therefore, this paper
evaluates the required space to keep such structures and the
several intermediate nite state automata that arise during the
process of constructing such AS. We perform the evaluation
on six well-known families of CG. The results show which
structures are space-efcient to implement the scheme, and
how the size of such structures depends on the so-called kfellow traveler property.

graph [4]. The groups that can be represented by an AS are

called Automatic Groups (AGs). One of the most important
aspect of such groups is their ability to efciently solve the
Minimum Word Problem (MWP) [5], which is equivalent to
solve the shortest path problem between any pair of vertices
in the CG.
Taking advantage of the fact that nite groups are AG, a
fast general-purpose shortest path routing scheme for CG
with compact routing tables was presented in [6]. This
scheme uses the concept of Shortlex Automatic Structure
(SAS) of a group ([3], Section 2.5). However, the needed
space for such structures was not considered into the complexity analysis. Therefore, this paper presents an experimental analysis and evaluation on the required space to keep
such structures in six well-known families of CG. We also
implement some nite state automata that performs the same
task of the SAS to evaluate their performance. The results
show which structures are space-efcient to implement the
scheme, and how the size of such structures depends on the
so-called k-fellow traveler property.
The paper is structured as follows. Section II presents the
challenges behind the design of routing schemes for DCs.
Section III surveys the works related with general-purpose
routing scheme for CG. Section IV introduces background
about group theory, graphs of groups and automatic structures. Section V presents the general-purpose shortest path
scheme and the alternative structures to be evaluated. Section
VI describes the graph families where the structures are
evaluated, and the metric used to make comparisons. Section
VII presents the comparison between the space requirements
of the evaluated structures and the size of a routing table of
a general-propose algorithm for CGs. Finally, Section VIII
presents the conclusions and future work.

Keywords-Cayley Graphs, Interconnection Networks, Data

Centers, Finite State Automata, Routing Scheme.

I. I NTRODUCTION
The growing demand for cloud computing services is
leading to an increasing deployment of large-scale Data
Centers (DCs) as the underlying infrastructure to provide
those services. However, the exponential grown of such
DCs entails many challenges in terms of scalability, faulttolerance, energy efciency and performance [1]. Therefore,
the design of DCs architectures with high-efcient routing
schemes plays an important role to face some of those
challenges. Cayley Graphs (CGs), a kind of graphs that
represents an algebraic group, has been studied and proposed
to represent the underlying interconnection network of DCs
with many interesting properties [2].
In the last decade, the concept of algebraic groups with
Automatic Structure (AS) [3] has become interesting for
CGs. The main idea behind AS is to encode the global
structure of the graph into a Finite State Automaton (FSA).
The automaton constructs local models of the graph and
rules to put them together. This can be done by exploring
the homogeneity of CG to unwrap a local neighborhood
around the identity element and then to obtain the global
1545-0678/14 $31.00 2014 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICDCSW.2014.29

II. ROUTING P ROBLEM

FOR

DATA C ENTERS

The design of the interconnection network for large-scale

data centers has the goal of nding graph models that i) have
good properties such as small diameter, high connectivity,
small degree, etc., which ensures good performance in terms
of throughput, delay, robustness, etc., and ii) allow efcient
63

O ((| S | +
 | B |) | |) and its time complexity is bounded by
O | |3 . Recently, we proposed in [6] a scheme that works
on any CG with nite group presentation. This scheme uses
the fact that nite groups are automatics and they can be
efciently presented by FSA. The resulting routing table for
algorithm is O(dg) and its time complexity is O(D2 ), where
dg is the degree of any node in the CG and D is the diameter
of the network, respectively. Although this scheme has very
compact routing tables, which is the degree of any node,
the space requirements for the FSA could be worst than the
traditional routing table of the previews works. The space
requirements of several structures to implement this scheme
are evaluated in this paper. A survey of how this scheme
works is presented in Section V.

routing schemes that have compact routing tables keeping

the shortest routes [2]. To deal with the rst problem, the
CG, a kind of graphs that represents an algebraic group,
has been studied and proposed as a general kind of graphs
to represent interconnection network of DCs [7]. Properties
such as vertex symmetry makes possible to implement the
same routing scheme in each node of the network model,
or their hierarchical structure and high connectivity allow
recursive construction and facilitates fault tolerance [2]. Note
that although the denition of the CG implies that the
vertices to be elements of some group, it does not imply any
specic group. This gives the exibility to choose different
groups to built different CGs with restrictions on diameter
and vertex degree.
Network routing is the task to nd the shortest path
between any pair of vertices, and it has been well studied and solved through diverse algorithm approaches. The
well-known Dijkstra or Bellman-Fords algorithms have the
advantage that they can be used in any kind of graph, but the
disadvantage of requiring large amount of memory resources
(to build the routing table) and/or their convergence time
is slow in large graphs [7]. As an alternative, the design
of routing schemes for specic type of graphs can take
advantage from their topological characteristics. Several
examples of graphs used as underlying graph for large-scale
DCs with good topological properties are the hypercubes,
butteries and the star graphs [8] [9], which are CGs of some
algebraic groups. However, the main drawback on the design
of these architectures is that each one of those families of
CGs has its own routing scheme and the usually they can
not ensure shortest path routing. Note that the importance
of shortest path routing in large-scale DCs is due to routing
through no-shortest paths implies to increase both the time
communication cost and the energy consumption [1].

IV. G ROUPS , G RAPHS AND AUTOMATIC S TRUCTURES

In this section, we establish terminology, notation, and
background material about group theory and automatic
structures for groups. For more denitions and results on
combinatorial group theory we refer the reader to [13], for
groups and their graphs to [14], and for automatic structures
in groups to [3].
A. Groups and their Cayley Graphs
Let G be a group. The identity of the group G is denoted
by e and the group operation is the multiplication. Let S =
{s1 , . . . , sn } be a set of elements in a group such that S G.
We say that S generates G if every element of G can be
expressed as a product of elements from S and their inverses.
A word is a sequence w = (s1 s2 . . .), where si S S1 , for
all i. A word w is freely reduced if it does not contain any
sub-word si s1
i . A group is called free with basis S, which
is represented by F(S), if S is a set of generators for the
group and no freely reduced word w F(S) represents the
identity. Finally, G has a presentation G = S|R if G can be
described by a set S of generators and a set R of dening
relations for these generators, i.e. a set of relations from
which all others can be derived [13].
Denition 1: The Cayley Graph of G with respect to S
is the graph (G, S) with vertex set V () = {g | g G} and
edge set E() = {(g, gs) | s S, g G}.
In this paper the graph (G, S) is considered undirected
(i.e. S = S1 ) and it has no auto-loops (i.e. e  S) and no
multiple edges (si = s j , si , s j S). Note that for any nite
presentation of a group in terms of generators and relators,
there exists an associated Cayley Graph, i.e. the geometry
and structure of the (G, S) is directly related with a group
presentation and specically with its generator set [14].
A metric on the CG is dened by assigning unit length
to each edge and dening the distance between two points
to be the minimum length of paths joining them.
Denition 2: Let : F(S) G be a group homomorphism and let (w) be the element g G represented by
w under . The length of g, identied by ls (g), is the length

III. R ELATED W ORK

In general, routing schemes are designed specically
for each family of interconnection networks based on CG
[10][8][11][9]. Therefore, the number of general-purpose
routing schemes, i.e. routing schemes that can work on
any CG, is very limited. K. Tang and B. Arden proved
in [12] that all nite Cayley Graphs can be represented by
generalized chordal rings (GCR) and by this transformation,
an iterative routing algorithm based on table look-up is
presented. The space complexity of such algorithm is O(n2 )
for a network of n nodes and a time complexity of O(D),
where D is the diameter of the network. In [7], the proposed
routing scheme uses the Schreier-Sims algorithm to nd
the shortest path between two vertex of the Cayley Graph
(G, S) by factoring elements of the group G in the generator
set S. Let be a nite set and G be a subgroup (a
permutation group) of the symmetric group Sym on .
Given a strong set of generators S and a base B for G, the
space complexity of the proposed algorithm is bounded by

64

Thus, given a group G with generator set S, a word w S

is called a geodesic if it has minimal length among all strings
representing the same element as w. Since the language of
all geodesic strings maps nite-to-one onto G, a SAS is an
AS for G that contains a geodesic representative for each
g G.

of the shortest word in the free group F(S) representing g,

i.e. ls (g) = min{ls (w) | w F(S), (w) = g}.
Denition 3: Let G be a group with generating set S. The
corresponding word metric (i.e. distance function) ds is the
metric on G satisfying d(e, s) = d(e, s1 ) = 1 for all s S,
and d(g, h) = min{ls (w) | w F(S), (w) = g1 h}, for all
g, h G.
This metric measures how efcient the difference g1 h
can be expressed as a word in the generating set for G. Thus,
the word metric of the group corresponds to the induced
graph metric on (G, S).

C. The Shortest Path Problem in Cayley Graphs

Let g and h be two vertices in (G, S) represented by
the words (or labels) wg and wh in the set S S1 . If
wh = wg s1 s2 ...st with si (S S1 ), 1 i t, then s1 s2 . . . st
denes a path from vertex g to h with edges labeled by
s1 s2 ...st in (G, S). This is equivalent to nding a path from
g1 h = s1 s2 . . . st to the vertex e. Notice that given g and
h, solving the shortest path problem between any pair of
vertices in the CG turns into nding a word w = s1 s2 . . . . st
with minimum length such that w1
g wh = w. This problem is
called the MWP [5]. In general, this problem is efciently
solved in an AG: by using the General Multiplier Automaton
(GM) we can reduce an arbitrary word w S to an
equivalent word v L(WA) in quadratic time with respect
to the length of w (see Theorem 2.3.10, [3]).

B. Automatic Structures and Automatic Groups

Let G be a group, A an alphabet and A the set of strings
(or words) on the alphabet A. By interpreting concatenation
as an associative multiplication on G, we dene a group
homomorphism : A G. If w is a string over A, we
say that (w) is the element of G represented by w. If
the homomorphism is surjective, i.e. (A) generates G as
a group, then A is the set of group generators for G. In
the rest of the paper, we will use the set S to reference
both generators of the group and the alphabet A. Given any
word w, there is an associated edge path in (G, S). The
path starts at the identity vertex and then traverses edges
of (G, S) as dictated by w. Conversely, every nite edge
path in (G, S) describes a word in terms of the generators
and their inverses: reading off the labels of edges being
traversed, and adding an inverse if they are traveling in the
opposite direction of the orientation of the edge. Given this
relationship between languages and groups, D. Epstein et.
al. present in [3] a complete work about algebraic groups
treated by nite state automaton.
Denition 4: Let G be a group and L(FSA) be the language of a FSA. An AS on G consists of a set S of generators
of G, a nite state automaton WA over S, and a nite
state automaton Ms over (S, S), for s (S e), satisfying the
following conditions: 1) the map : L(WA) G is surjective
and 2) for s (S e), we have (w1 , w2 ) L(Ms ) if and only
if (w1 )s = (w2 ) and both w1 , w2 L(WA).
In the denition, WA is called the Word Acceptor, Me the
Equality Recognizer, and each Ms , for s S, a Multiplier
Automaton for the AS. An AG is one that admits an
AS. If Word Acceptor Automaton (WA) accepts an unique
word mapping onto each element of G, e.g. choosing the
lexicographically least among the shortest words that map
onto each element as the normal form representative of that
element, we say that the WA has the uniqueness property.
Denition 5: Let S be some total order on the alphabet
S. An AS is called SAS if L(WA) consists of the shortlex
least representatives of each element g G; therefore the
map 1 : L(WA) G is bijective and all paths in (G, S)
according to the words of L(WA) are shortest ones. In other
words, L(WA) = {w S | w S v, w, v S , w =G v}.

V. A ROUTING S CHEME FOR C AYLEY G RAPHS

In [6], the authors presented a Shortest Path Routing
Scheme for any network with underlying CG. In the following sub-sections we summarize the scheme and its complexity. We also describe some structures that can be used
to implement the scheme.
A. A Two-Step Scheme
Let G = S|R be group presentation of the graph (G, S).
The scheme consists of two procedures, the vertex labeling
and the message forwarding. The vertex labeling procedure
is the following:
Select a random vertex of (G, S) and construct a
spanning tree T () rooted on it by using the Breadth
First Search (BFS) algorithm. In the same process, label
all vertices with an integer from 1 (the root vertex) to
| G |= n, according their order of discovery.
Enumerate the elements of the group G according to its
shortlex ordering (corresponding to a BFS through S )
and re-label each vertex in the spanning tree with its
corresponding shortlex word enumerated before. Note
that there exists natural one-to-one mapping between
vertices and the elements of the group represented by
their shortlex words following their BFS ordering.
Create a table with d rows in each vertex g T (),
where d is the vertex degree, and keep the label of
each vertex at distance 1 from itself.
The message forwarding procedure uses the word metric
on G to perform a greedy routing strategy. Given two
vertices g, h (G, S) with labels wg and wh , the procedure
to nd the shortest path between them is the following:

65

When a message arrives to g, compare the label of g

with the destination label and verify whether they are
equal or not.
If the labels are equal, the destination is reached.
Otherwise, send the message to the neighbor pi of g,
where i [1, . . . , d], such that ls (w1
pi wh ) is minimum.
If there exists more than one neighbor pi with equal
minimum length on ls (w1
pi wh ), then the message is sent
to the neighbor with shortlex w pi .
The size of the routing table for this procedure is bounded
by O(dg n) because each vertex keeps a list of its dg
neighbors. With respect to time complexity, we can use a
SAS for G to perform forwarding by solving the equivalent
MWP. Here, the time to take a routing decision is bounded
by O(D2 ), where D is the diameter of (G, S). Note that any
two vertices g, h (G, S) with labels wg and wh will have
ls (wg ) D and ls (wh ) D. In fact, any resulting word from
1
w1
g wh has ls (wg wh ) 2D. Since a SAS can reduce any
word w of length ls (w) in a time proportional to O(ls (w)2 ),
any word v = wg wh will have a length ls (v) 2D, and then
it can be reduced in O(D2 ) to a shortlex equivalent word.

us if a specic left-hand in a CRS is a sub-word of a given

word w. Since this automaton identies sub-words of w with
left-hand sides in the CRS, we can replace that sub-word by
the right-hand side of the equation. It is proved in [18] that
this automaton improves the performance of a CRS to reduce
words. If the CRS is conuent with respect to a shortlex
ordering, then the mapping : L(IA) G is bijective. It
implies that we can enumerate the elements of a group G in
shortlex order by enumerating the language of IA.
3) Word-Differences Automaton: Any automatic structure
has the so-called fellow-traveler property [3]. Let P and Q
be any two path in CG with the same origin vertex o and
ending at distance at most 1. We say that the CG has the
k-fellow-traveler property if for any two vertices a P and
b Q with distances d(o, a) = d(o, b), then d(a, b) k. It
implies that there exist a nite set of D (word differences)
such that if u, v L(WA) and either u = v or u1 v = s for
some s S, and p(u) and p(v) are prexes of u and v
having the same length, p(u)1 p(v) D. Therefore, the
Word Difference Automaton (WD) is the automaton that
accepts (u, v) if and only if s1 u1 v D for some s S.
The set D can be seen as reduction rules for the group G,
and then it is possible to use the WD to reduce any word in
the group (see Lemma 3.3, [18]).
The package KBMAG [19] implements some procedures
to construct the CRS, IA, WD and the SAS from a nite
group presentation G = S|R.

B. Implementing the Scheme

A way to implement the above two-step scheme is using
the SAS of a nite group G = S|R. The rst step is
performed by enumerating the language of the WA. This
enumeration gives us an unique shortlex word to represent
each vertex (element) in the CG. The second one uses the
GM to reduce the word w1
g wh to an equivalent word with
minimum length that is accepted by WA. However, this is not
the only way to do that. There exist additional alternatives
to perform these two processes. Finding a SAS for a group
G implies the creation of several intermediate structures
(see Chap. 6, [3]). These structures could be used to solve
the MWP if the group G has a conuent rewriting system
[15]. Therefore, these intermediate structures can be used to
perform the shortest path routing scheme described above.
A general description of these structures is the following:
1) Conuent Rewriting System: A Conuent Rewriting
System (CRS) consists in a system of reductions (or directed
equations) of the form v w. The main property of this
system is that any word in the group that is not in normal
form is composed by a sub-word that is the left-hand side of
one of these equations. Therefore, a group with a CRS can
use such system to reduce any word to an unique normal
form by replacing the left-hand side of one of the equations
by its right-hand side in a nite number of steps. The KnuthBendix procedure is an efcient method to make a rewriting
system conuent [15]. It is important to note that nite
groups always have a conuent CRS (See [16] and [17],
Sec. 2.9).
2) Index Automaton: The Index Automaton (IA) is an
automaton that recognizes the set of words that are reducible
with respect to a given CRS. In general, this automaton tells

VI. E VALUATING S PACE R EQUIREMENTS OF D IFFERENT

I MPLEMENTATIONS FOR L ABELING AND F ORWARDING
Section V presented a low-complexity routing scheme for
any network with CG as underlying graph. However, the
required space for the structures that perform the labeling
and forwarding processes was not considered. This section
presents the methodology used to evaluate the impact of
memory consumption of such structures in some key families of CG.
A. Cayley Graph Models
Although there are several models of CG [2] [20] [21]
[22], we select six well-known families of CG used as
interconnection networks for our evaluations: Hypercube,
Buttery, Transposition, Bubble-Sort, Star and Pancake. A
description of them is presented below. See Table I for a
survey of their main properties.
1) Hypercube Graph H(n): The Hypercube is the graph
with vertex set V () = {x1 x2 ...xn : x {0, 1}}. Two vertices
(a1 a2 ...an ) and (b1 b2 ...bn ) are adjacent if and only if ai = bi
for all but one i, 1 i n. This graph is the CG on the group
Z2n with generator set S = {(0, ..., 0, si , 0, ..., 0) : si = 1, 1 i
n}. It has 2n vertices and both its diameter and degree are
equal to n.

66

Table I
M AIN PROPERTIES OF THE EVALUATED C AYLEY G RAPHS
Graph Family

Nodes

Degree

Diameter

H(n)
BF(n)
T P(n)
BS(n)
ST (n)
P(n)

2n
n 2n
n!
n!
n!
n!

n
4

n
3(n)/2
n1

n
2

n1
n1
n1

Table II
T HE VALUE OF n AND THE RESULTING NUMBER OF VERTICES FOR H(n),
BF(n), T P(n), BS(n), ST (n) AND P(n)

n
2

3(n 1)/2
17n/16 Diameter (5n + 5)/3

2) Buttery Graph BF(n): The Buttery is the CG with

vertex set V () = Zn Z2n . Any vertex (i, x) V (), where
x = (x1 x2 ...xn ) and 1 i n, is connected to the vertices
(i + 1, x) and (i+1,x(i)) where x(i) denote the string that is
derived from x by replacing xi by 1 xi . All operations on i
are made module n. This graph is isomorphic to the CG on
the subgroup of the Symmetric Group Sym2n generated by
S = {(123...2n)2 , (123...2n)2 (12)}. It is a 4-regular graph of
n 2n vertices and diameter 3(n)/2 .
3) Transposition Graph T P(n): The Transposition graph
on Symn has generation set S = {(i, j) Symn , 1 i < j
n}, where (i, j) transposes the ith and jth elements of a
permutation
by right multiplication. This graph is a bipartite
n
2 -regular graph of order n! and diameter n 1.

Cayley Graph

Instance

Number of Vertices

H(n)

1
2
3
4
5
6

6
9
10
12
16
18

64
512
1024
4096
65536
262144

BF(n)

1
2
3
4
5
6

4
6
7
9
12
14

64
384
896
4608
49152
229376

T P(n), BS(n), ST (n), P(n)

1
2
3
4
5
6

4
5
6
7
8
9

24
120
720
5040
40320
362880

B. Structures and the evaluation metric

In addition to the SAS, we also evaluate the space requirements of some implementations that use the intermediate
structures described in Section V-B. The combinations are
presented below:
The IA / CRS+IA for labeling / forwarding.
The IA / WD for labeling / forwarding.
The WA / WD of a SAS for labeling / forwarding.
To compare the space requirements of such structures with
respect to a traditional routing table, it is necessary to dene
the size of an Equivalent Routing Table (ERT) for those
structures. Since all structures (except CRS) are FSA, they
can be easily seen as graphs. Thus, we dene that for each
FSA the required space for its ERT is bounded by O(t),
where t is the number of states of such FSA. In general,
for a network of size |G| = |V ()|, the space complexity is
O(t |V ()|). In the case of CRS, we also dene its ERT as
O(t), where t is the number of equations of the CRS.
The ERTs were compared with those tables generated by
the general-purpose shortest path scheme for CGs presented
in [12]. The space complexity of this algorithm is bounded
by O(|V ()|2 ). Based on it, we dene the metric Compacting
()|)
O(t)
= O(|V
Ratio (CR) as CR = O(t|V
()|) to evaluate the
O(|V ()|2 )
efciency of the implemented structures. If cp >= 1, it
indicates that the ERT consumes equal or more space than
that one generated by the scheme used for comparison.
Otherwise, the evaluated structure is more space-efcient.

4) Bubble-Sort Graph BS(n): The Bubble-Sort graph on

Symn is generated by the set of transpositions S = {(i, i+1)
Symn , 1 i < n}, where (i, i + 1) interchanges the ith and
(i + 1)th elements of a permutation when multiplied on the
right. The order of this graph is n!. It is also a bipartite
(n 1)-regular and its diameter is n2 .
5) Star Graph ST (n): The Star graph is the Cayley
Graph on Symn with the generating set of transpositions
S = {(1, i) Symn , 1 < i n}, where (1, i) interchanges the
rst and ith elements of a permutation by right multiplication. This graph has n! vertices, it is a bipartite (n 1)regular with diameter 3(n 1)/2 .
6) Pancake Graph P(n): The Pancake graph on Symn
is generated by the set S = {ri Symn , 2 i n} for all
prex-reversal ri that reverses the order of any sub-string
[1,i], 2 i n of a permutation by right multiplication.
In other words, [1 . . . i i+1 . . . n ] ri = [i . . . 1 i+1 . . . n ].
It is a (n 1)-regular graph with n! vertices and satises
17n/16 Diameter (5n + 5)/3.
Note that for all cases, the number of vertices of the
graphs depends on the value of n. So, for each family
of graphs, we generated six graphs with different number
of vertices for our analysis. In this way, there are six
instances composed by one graph from each graph family.
For comparison purposes, the generated graphs have similar
number of nodes in every of the six different sizes. Table
II presents the values for n and the number of vertices for
each graph in each one of evaluated graph families.

VII. R ESULTS
Figure 1 shows the results of the space evaluation for different automatons and different graphs (families and sizes).
The H(n), BS(n) and T P(n) presented the best CR metric.
Their CR had an exponential decrease (tending to zero) in

67

Figure 1.

Comparison of Compacting Ratio metric for each graph family

all the instances of such graphs. The only exception was the
SAS that had a CR over 1 in the rst instance of both BS(n)
and T P(n). On the other hand, BF(n), ST (n) and P(n) had
a slow decrease in the CR value. However, after the second
instance, the BF(n) and ST (n) obtained a CR less than 1.
In general, the P(n) had the worst behavior with CR over 1
in all combinations with the exception of WA+WD.
The automata combination with the best performance was
to use the WA for the labeling process together with the WD
for the forwarding process of the routing scheme. Figure
2 shows the CR of such combination for each family of
graphs, when the number of vertices increases. In almost all
the instances, this combination performs better in terms of
space requirements than the scheme used for comparison.
Note that the graphs BF(n) and ST (n) also obtained a fast
decreasing of the CR with this combination of automata.
This was expected because the process to nd a SAS uses an
initial WD to construct the GM. Since the second automaton
is more complex, which is consequence of SAS denition, it
will have more states than the rst one. This also happened
with the WA and the IA, where the rst one always was
smaller than the second one.
We also analyzed the best performance of H(n), BS(n)
and T P(n) in terms of space requirements with respect to the
other three families of graphs. By analyzing their respective
SAS (see [3], Lemma 2.3.2), we saw that this behavior was
due to the k-fellow-traveler property. Figure 3 shows the
value of k for all the instances of each family of graphs. For
H(n), BS(n) and T P(n) the value of k is a small constant for
all their instances. It means that their ERT always have an
entry, or equivalently a state in the FSA, for each vertex in
the ball of ratio karound the identity vertex. On the contrary,
the value of k for the graphs BF(n), ST (n) and P(n) is not a

Figure 2.

CR of the combination WD+WA in each family of graphs

Figure 3.

The k-fellow property for each family of graphs

constant and it depends on the number of nodes. Therefore,

the SAS size (and the size of their intermediate structures)
also increases in a proportion related to k.

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VIII. C ONCLUSION
The structure of interconnection networks with underlying
CG impacts on the space requirements of a routing scheme
based on automata. We have shown that a CG with both low
and constant k-fellow traveler property, needs very small
routing tables. This was veried in the cases of the CG
families Hypercube, Bubble-Sort and Transposition graphs.
Other graph families such as Buttery, Star and Pancake
also have a small tables with respect to a general-purpose
algorithm for the same kind of graphs. However, in the latest
cases, the reduction of the routing table size only is effective
when the number of vertices is very large.
The evaluation of different FSAs to implement proposed
scheme [6] indicated that a SAS is not the best option to do
it. In fact, since nite groups have nite CRS, it is possible to
use some alternative structures based on automata to perform
the same task as SAS with less space requirements. Those
structures arise from the process of constructing a SAS for
the group that represents the CG. However, there are several
cases where constructing the SAS would be recommended.
For example, the WA can be used to compute the growth
function of a CG, which is a function that determines the
number of vertices at given distance from any vertex, or
to compute the k-fellow traveler property of the CG by
analyzing the individual multipliers of the AS. Future work
will entail in the design the new interconnection networks
with underlying CG for data-centers, with routing scheme
based on AS and very small routing tables. It implies that
these networks must enjoy both a low and constant value of
the k-fellow traveler property, while it keeps all the wellknown properties of CGs.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research work is partially funded by the European
Commission (EULER project, FP7 258307), the Spanish
Government (RoGER project, TEC 2012-32336), the Generalitat of Catalonia (CSI project, SGR-1202), and the SUR of
the Generalitat of Catalonia and the European Social Fund
(PhD grant FI-DGR 2011).
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