Strong structural properties of unidirectional star graphs

Day and Tripathi [K. Day, A. Tripathi, Unidirectional star graphs, Inform. Process. Lett. 45 (1993) 123–129] proposed an assignment of directions on the star graphs and derived attractive properties for the resulting directed graphs: an important one is that they are strongly connected. In [E. Cheng, M.J. Lipman, On the Day–Tripathi orientation of the star graphs: Connectivity, Inform. Process. Lett. 73 (2000) 5–10] it is shown that the Day–Tripathi orientations are in fact maximally arc-connected when nn is odd; when nn is even, they can be augmented to maximally arc-connected digraphs by adding a minimum set of arcs. This gives strong evidence that the Day–Tripathi orientations are good orientations. In [E. Cheng, M.J. Lipman, Connectivity properties of unidirectional star graphs, Congr. Numer. 150 (2001) 33–42] it is shown that vertex-connectivity is maximal, and that if we delete as many vertices as the connectivity, we can create at most two strong connected components, at most one of which is not a singleton. In this paper we prove an asymptotically sharp upper bound for the number of vertices we can delete without creating two nonsingleton strong components, and we also give sharp upper bounds on the number of singletons that we might create.