English

Decompositions of complete multigraphs into stars of varying sizes

Combinatorics 2020-06-02 v3

Abstract

In 1979 Tarsi showed that an edge decomposition of a complete multigraph into stars of size mm exists whenever some obvious necessary conditions hold. In 1992 Lonc gave necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an edge decomposition of a (simple) complete graph into stars of sizes m1,,mtm_1,\ldots,m_t. We show that the general problem of when a complete multigraph admits a decomposition into stars of sizes m1,,mtm_1,\ldots,m_t is NP\mathsf{NP}-complete, but that it becomes tractable if we place a strong enough upper bound on max(m1,,mt)\max(m_1,\ldots,m_t). We determine the upper bound at which this transition occurs. Along the way we also give a characterisation of when an arbitrary multigraph can be decomposed into stars of sizes m1,,mtm_1,\ldots,m_t with specified centres, and a generalisation of Landau's theorem on tournaments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1807.10738,
  title  = {Decompositions of complete multigraphs into stars of varying sizes},
  author = {Rosalind A. Cameron and Daniel Horsley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.10738},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

30 pages, 0 figures