Independent spanning trees vs. edge-disjoint spanning trees in locally twisted cubes

Fault-tolerant broadcasting and secure message distribution are important issues for numerous applications in networks. It is a common idea to design multiple spanning trees with a specific property in the underlying graph of a network to serve as a broadcasting scheme or a distribution protocol for receiving high levels of fault-tolerance and of security. A set of spanning trees in a graph is said to be edge-disjoint if these trees are rooted at the same node without sharing any common edge. Hsieh and Tu [S.-Y. Hsieh, C.-J. Tu, Constructing edge-disjoint spanning trees in locally twisted cubes, Theoretical Computer Science 410 (2009) 926–932] recently presented an algorithm for constructing n edge-disjoint spanning trees in an n-dimensional locally twisted cube. In this paper, we prove that indeed all spanning trees constructed by their algorithm are independent, i.e., any two spanning trees are rooted at the same node, say r, and for any other node v≠r, the two different paths from v to r, one path in each tree, are internally node-disjoint.