Containment properties of product and power graphs

In this paper, we study containment properties of graphs in relation with the Cartesian product operation. These results can be used to derive embedding results for interconnection networks for parallel architectures.First, we show that the isomorphism of two Cartesian powers G^r and H^r implies the isomorphism of G and H, while G^r⊆H^r does not imply G⊆H, even for the special cases when G and H are prime, and when they are connected and have the same number of nodes at the same time.Then, we find a simple sufficient condition under which the containment of products implies the containment of the factors: if , where all graphs G_i are connected and no graph H_j has 4-cycles, then each G_i is a subgraph of a different graph H_j. Hence, if G is connected and H has no 4-cycles, then G^r⊆H^r implies G⊆H.Finally, we focus on the particular case of products of graphs with the linear array. We show that the fact that G×L_n⊆H×L_n does not imply that G⊆H even in the case when G and H are connected and have the same number of nodes. However, we find a sufficient condition under which G×L_n⊆H×L_n implies G⊆H.