English

Rainbow connection number and the number of blocks

Combinatorics 2012-11-06 v2

Abstract

An edge-colored graph GG is rainbow connected if every pair of vertices of GG are connected by a path whose edges have distinct colors. The rainbow connection number rc(G)rc(G) of GG is defined to be the minimum integer tt such that there exists an edge-coloring of GG with tt colors that makes GG rainbow connected. For a graph GG without any cut vertex, i.e., a 2-connected graph, of order nn, it was proved that rc(G)n2rc(G)\leq \lceil\frac n 2 \rceil and the bound is tight. In this paper, we prove that for a connected graph GG of order nn with cut vertices, rc(G)n+r12rc(G) \leq\frac{n+r-1} 2, where rr is the number of blocks of GG with even orders, and the upper bound is tight. Moreover, we also obtain a tight upper bound for a bridgeless graph, i.e., a 2-edge-connected graph.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1211.0141,
  title  = {Rainbow connection number and the number of blocks},
  author = {Xueliang Li and Sujuan Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1211.0141},
  year   = {2012}
}

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7 pages