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A self-centered graph is a graph whose diameter equals its radius. I am looking for examples of families of self-centered graphs. Here are some examples I know:

  1. Disconnected graphs
  2. cliques
  3. bicliques
  4. cycles
  5. Take two vertices and connect them by $k\geq2$ disjoint paths of the same length
  6. take a self-centered graph and replace every edge $uv$ by a 4-cycle $uxvy$ (e.g. when you start with a single edge and repeat this procedure k times you have the so-called k-th diamond graph which btw. is a nice example of a graph metric which needs high distortion to embed into Euclidean space)

Do you know some further nice examples? Especially I am looking for examples with large radius (for my purposes that means radius of size $\omega(\log n)$ where $n$ is the number of vertices) which are nonplanar. Also other ways than 6. to systematically construct self-centered graphs would be interesting.

edit: More examples:

  1. There is a complete list of all self-centered graphs with diameter 2 that have minimum number of edges in: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119436272/abstract
  2. For every finite group $\Gamma$ there is a self-centered graph whose automorphism group is isomorphic to $\Gamma$ (S.-M. Lee, P.-C. Wang, On groups of automorphisms of self-centered graphs,. Bull. Math. Soc. Sci. Math. Roumanie)
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Any vertex transitive graph. – Emil Jul 17 2010 at 19:41
See also mathoverflow.net/questions/64746/… – Alain Valette Jan 2 2012 at 15:27

3 Answers

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As Emil mentioned, any vertex-transitive graph has a radius equal to its diameter. On the other hand, families of $k$-regular graphs have a diameter in $\Omega(\log n)$, where $n$ is the number of vertices. Combining both observations you get many examples with radius in $\Omega(\log n)$. You can cross with $K_5$ to make them non-planar.

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complete graphs are also self centered graphs. infact 1-self centered graphs

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Doesn't that fall under the heading, "cliques", which was number 2 on the list of OP? – Gerry Myerson Jan 2 2012 at 14:52
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There is a discussion of self-centered graphs in:

Fred Buckley and Frank Harary, Distances in Graphs, Addison-Wesley, 1990.

The discussion of self-centered graphs is on pages 38-42 (and a few other pages), and Fred Buckley wrote some other papers on this subject but I don't have the references immediately available.

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Thank you for the reference. A quick google search yields this survey paper by Buckley: www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119436272/… – Paolo Ketter-Umbanza Jul 18 2010 at 10:24

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