The bondage numbers of extended de Bruijn and Kautz digraphs *

In this paper, we consider the bondage number b(G) for a digraph G, which is defined as the minimum number of edges whose removal results in a new digraph with larger domination number. This parameter measures to some extent the robustness of an interconnection network with respect to link failures. By constructing a family of minimum dominating sets, we compute the bondage numbers of the extended de Bruijn digraph and the extended Kautz digraph. As special cases, we obtain for the de Bruijn digraph B(d, n) and the Kautz digraph K(d, n) that b(B(d, n)) = d if n is odd and d ⩽ b(B(d, n)) < 2d if n is even, and b(K(d, n)) = d + 1.