English

Rainbow connections for planar graphs and line graphs

Computational Complexity 2011-11-15 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

An edge-colored graph GG is rainbow connected if any two vertices are connected by a path whose edges have distinct colors. The rainbow connection number of a connected graph GG, denoted by rc(G)rc(G), is the smallest number of colors that are needed in order to make GG rainbow connected. It was proved that computing rc(G)rc(G) is an NP-Hard problem, as well as that even deciding whether a graph has rc(G)=2rc(G)=2 is NP-Complete. It is known that deciding whether a given edge-colored graph is rainbow connected is NP-Complete. We will prove that it is still NP-Complete even when the edge-colored graph is a planar bipartite graph. We also give upper bounds of the rainbow connection number of outerplanar graphs with small diameters. A vertex-colored graph is rainbow vertex-connected if any two vertices are connected by a path whose internal vertices have distinct colors. The rainbow vertex-connection number of a connected graph GG, denoted by rvc(G)rvc(G), is the smallest number of colors that are needed in order to make GG rainbow vertex-connected. It is known that deciding whether a given vertex-colored graph is rainbow vertex-connected is NP-Complete. We will prove that it is still NP-Complete even when the vertex-colored graph is a line graph.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1110.3147,
  title  = {Rainbow connections for planar graphs and line graphs},
  author = {Xiaolong Huang and Xueliang Li and Yongtang Shi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1110.3147},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

13 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:20:11.487Z