The rainbow connection of a graph is (at most) reciprocal to its minimum degree

• Authors: Michael Krivelevich;Raphael Yuster
• Venue: Journal of Graph Theory
• Year: 2010

An edge-colored graph Gis rainbow edge-connected if any two vertices are connected by a path whose edges have distinct colors. The rainbow connection of a connected graph G, denoted by rc(G), is the smallest number of colors that are needed in order to make Grainbow edge-connected. We prove that if Ghas nvertices and minimum degree δ then rc(G)20n-δ. This solves open problems from Y. Caro, A. Lev, Y. Roditty, Z. Tuza, and R. Yuster (Electron J Combin 15 (2008), #R57) and S. Chakrborty, E. Fischer, A. Matsliah, and R. Yuster (Hardness and algorithms for rainbow connectivity, Freiburg (2009), pp. 243–254). A vertex-colored graph Gis rainbow vertex-connected if any two vertices are connected by a path whose internal vertices have distinct colors. The rainbow vertex-connection of a connected graph G, denoted by rvc(G), is the smallest number of colors that are needed in order to make Grainbow vertex-connected. One cannot upper-bound one of these parameters in terms of the other. Nevertheless, we prove that if Ghas nvertices and minimum degree δ then rvc(G)11n-δ. We note that the proof in this case is different from the proof for the edge-colored case, and we cannot deduce one from the other. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 63: 185–191, 2010