English

Reconstructing a graph from the distance matrix of its boundary

Combinatorics 2024-12-30 v8

Abstract

A vertex vv of a connected graph GG is said to be a boundary vertex of GG if for some other vertex uu of GG, no neighbor of vv is further away from uu than vv. The boundary (G)\partial(G) of GG is the set of all of its boundary vertices. The boundary distance matrix D^G\hat{D}_G of a graph G=([n],E)G=([n],E) is the square matrix of order κ\kappa, being κ\kappa the order of (G)\partial(G), such that for every i,j(G)i,j\in \partial(G), [D^G]ij=dG(i,j)[\hat{D}_G]_{ij}=d_G(i,j). Given a square matrix B^\hat{B} of order κ\kappa, we prove under which conditions B^\hat{B} is the distance matrix D^T\hat{D}_T of the set of leaves of a tree TT, which is precisely its boundary. We show that if GG is either a block graph or a unicyclic graph, then GG is uniquely determined by the boundary distance matrix D^G\hat{D}_{G} of GG and we also conjecture that this statement holds for every connected graph GG, whenever both the order nn and the boundary (and thus also the boundary distance matrix) of GG are prefixed. Moreover, an algorithm for reconstructing a 1-block graph (resp., a unicyclic graph) from its boundary distance matrix is given, whose time complexity in the worst case is O(κn)O(\kappa n) (resp., O(n2)O(n^2)).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.04039,
  title  = {Reconstructing a graph from the distance matrix of its boundary},
  author = {José Cáceres and Ignacio M. Pelayo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.04039},
  year   = {2024}
}