Upper Bounds for Sorting Permutations with a Transposition Tree

An upper bound for sorting permutations with an operation estimates the diameter of the corresponding Cayley graph and an exact upper bound equals the diameter. Computing tight upper bounds for various operations is of theoretical and practical (e.g. interconnection networks, genetics) interest. Akers and Krishnamurthy gave a Ω(n! n) time method that examines n! permutations to compute an upper bound, f(Γ ), to sort any permutation with a given transposition tree T , where Γ is the Cayley graph corresponding to T . We compute two intuitive upper bounds γ and δ for the same in O(n) time each by working solely with the transposition tree. Recently, Ganesan computed β, an estimate of the exact upper bound for the same, in O(n) time. Our upper bounds are tighter than f(Γ ) and β, on average and in most of the cases. For a class of trees, we prove that the new upper bounds are tighter than β