Covering abelian groups with cyclic subsets

Summary Letk andm be positive integers. An abelian groupG is said to have ann-cover if there is a subsetS ofG consisting ofn elements such that every non-zero element ofG can be expressed in the formig for some elementg inS and integeri, 1 i k. Lets _n (k) be the largest order of abelian groups that have ann-cover. We investigate the behavior ofs _n (k)/k ask andn is fixed.