Acyclic Coloring of Graphs of Maximum Degree $\Delta$

Fertin, Guillaume ; Raspaud, André

Discrete mathematics & theoretical computer science, DMTCS Proceedings vol. AE, European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications (EuroComb '05), DMTCS Proceedings vol. AE, European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications (EuroComb '05) (2005).

Résumé

An acyclic coloring of a graph $G$ is a coloring of its vertices such that: (i) no two neighbors in $G$ are assigned the same color and (ii) no bicolored cycle can exist in $G$. The acyclic chromatic number of $G$ is the least number of colors necessary to acyclically color $G$, and is denoted by $a(G)$. We show that any graph of maximum degree $\Delta$ has acyclic chromatic number at most $\frac{\Delta (\Delta -1) }{ 2}$ for any $\Delta \geq 5$, and we give an $O(n \Delta^2)$ algorithm to acyclically color any graph of maximum degree $\Delta$ with the above mentioned number of colors. This result is roughly two times better than the best general upper bound known so far, yielding $a(G) \leq \Delta (\Delta -1) +2$. By a deeper study of the case $\Delta =5$, we also show that any graph of maximum degree $5$ can be acyclically colored with at most $9$ colors, and give a linear time algorithm to achieve this bound.

Détail

DOI : 10.46298/dmtcs.3450