English

On strong rainbow connection number

Combinatorics 2010-11-01 v1

Abstract

A path in an edge-colored graph, where adjacent edges may be colored the same, is a rainbow path if no two edges of it are colored the same. For any two vertices uu and vv of GG, a rainbow uvu-v geodesic in GG is a rainbow uvu-v path of length d(u,v)d(u,v), where d(u,v)d(u,v) is the distance between uu and vv. The graph GG is strongly rainbow connected if there exists a rainbow uvu-v geodesic for any two vertices uu and vv in GG. The strong rainbow connection number of GG, denoted src(G)src(G), is the minimum number of colors that are needed in order to make GG strong rainbow connected. In this paper, we first investigate the graphs with large strong rainbow connection numbers. Chartrand et al. obtained that GG is a tree if and only if src(G)=msrc(G)=m, we will show that src(G)m1src(G)\neq m-1, so GG is not a tree if and only if src(G)m2src(G)\leq m-2, where mm is the number of edge of GG. Furthermore, we characterize the graphs GG with src(G)=m2src(G)=m-2. We next give a sharp upper bound for src(G)src(G) according to the number of edge-disjoint triangles in graph GG, and give a necessary and sufficient condition for the equality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1010.6139,
  title  = {On strong rainbow connection number},
  author = {Xueliang Li and Yuefang Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1010.6139},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

16 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:35:57.337Z