Restricted routing and wide diameter of the cycle prefix network

The cycle prefix network is a Cayley coset digraph based on sequences over an alphabet which has been proposed as a vertex symmetric communication network. This network has been shown to have many remarkable communication properties such as a large number of vertices for a given degree and diameter, simple shortest path routing, Hamiltonicity, optimal connectivity, and others. These considerations for designing symmetric and directed interconnection networks are well justified in practice and have been widely recognized in the research community. Among the important properties of a good network, efficient routing is probably one of the most important. In this paper, we further study routing schemes in the cycle prefix network. We confirm an observation first made from computer experiments regarding the diameter change when certain links are removed in the original network, and we completely determine the wide diameter of the network. The wide diameter of a network is now perceived to be even more important than the diameter. We show by construction that the wide diameter of the cycle prefix network is very close to the ordinary diameter. This means that routing in parallel in this network costs little extra time compared to ordinary single path routing.