L(2, 1)-labellings for direct products of a triangle and a cycle

An L(2, 1)-labelling of a graph G is a vertex labelling such that the difference of the labels of any two adjacent vertices is at least 2 and that of any two vertices of distance 2 is at least 1. The minimum span of all L(2, 1)-labellings of G is the λ-number of G and denoted by λ(G). Lin and Lam computed λ(G) for a direct product G=K _m ×P _n of a complete graph K _m and a path P _n . This is a natural lower bound of λ(K _m ×C _n ) for a cycle C _n . They also proved that when n≡ 0±od 5m, this bound is the exact value of λ(K _m ×C _n ) and computed the value when n=3, 5, 6. In this article, we compute the λ-number of G, where G is the direct product K ₃×C _n of the triangle and a cycle C _n for all the other n. In fact, we show that among these n, λ(K ₃×C _n )=7 for all n≠7, 11 and λ(K ₃×C _n )=8 when n=7, 11.