Complete Acyclic Colorings

We study two parameters that arise from the dichromatic number and the vertex-arboricity in the same way that the achromatic number comes from the chromatic number. The adichromatic number of a digraph is the largest number of colors its vertices can be colored with such that every color induces an acyclic subdigraph but merging any two colors yields a monochromatic directed cycle. Similarly, the a-vertex arboricity of an undirected graph is the largest number of colors that can be used such that every color induces a forest but merging any two yields a monochromatic cycle. We study the relation between these parameters and their behavior with respect to other classical parameters such as degeneracy and most importantly feedback vertex sets.Comment: 17 pages, no figure

Oriented coloring on recursively defined digraphs

Coloring is one of the most famous problems in graph theory. The coloring problem on undirected graphs has been well studied, whereas there are very few results for coloring problems on directed graphs. An oriented k-coloring of an oriented graph G=(V,A) is a partition of the vertex set V into k independent sets such that all the arcs linking two of these subsets have the same direction. The oriented chromatic number of an oriented graph G is the smallest k such that G allows an oriented k-coloring. Deciding whether an acyclic digraph allows an oriented 4-coloring is NP-hard. It follows, that finding the chromatic number of an oriented graph is an NP-hard problem. This motivates to consider the problem on oriented co-graphs. After giving several characterizations for this graph class, we show a linear time algorithm which computes an optimal oriented coloring for an oriented co-graph. We further prove how the oriented chromatic number can be computed for the disjoint union and order composition from the oriented chromatic number of the involved oriented co-graphs. It turns out that within oriented co-graphs the oriented chromatic number is equal to the length of a longest oriented path plus one. We also show that the graph isomorphism problem on oriented co-graphs can be solved in linear time.Comment: 14 page

Arc-Disjoint Paths and Trees in 2-Regular Digraphs

An out-(in-)branching B_s^+ (B_s^-) rooted at s in a digraph D is a connected spanning subdigraph of D in which every vertex x != s has precisely one arc entering (leaving) it and s has no arcs entering (leaving) it. We settle the complexity of the following two problems: 1) Given a 2-regular digraph $D$, decide if it contains two arc-disjoint branchings B^+_u, B^-_v. 2) Given a 2-regular digraph D, decide if it contains an out-branching B^+_u such that D remains connected after removing the arcs of B^+_u. Both problems are NP-complete for general digraphs. We prove that the first problem remains NP-complete for 2-regular digraphs, whereas the second problem turns out to be polynomial when we do not prescribe the root in advance. We also prove that, for 2-regular digraphs, the latter problem is in fact equivalent to deciding if $D$ contains two arc-disjoint out-branchings. We generalize this result to k-regular digraphs where we want to find a number of pairwise arc-disjoint spanning trees and out-branchings such that there are k in total, again without prescribing any roots.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

On a C⃗4\vec{C}_4-ultrahomogeneous oriented graph

The notion of a $\mathcal C$-ultrahomogeneous graph, due to Isaksen et al., is adapted for digraphs, and subsequently a strongly connected $\vec{C}_4$-ultrahomogeneous oriented graph on 168 vertices and 126 pairwise arc-disjoint 4-cycles is presented, with regular indegree and outdegree 3 and no circuits of lengths 2 and 3, by altering a definition of the Coxeter graph via pencils of ordered lines of the Fano plane in which pencils are replaced by ordered pencils.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

Generalized Interlinked Cycle Cover for Index Coding

A source coding problem over a noiseless broadcast channel where the source is pre-informed about the contents of the cache of all receivers, is an index coding problem. Furthermore, if each message is requested by one receiver, then we call this an index coding problem with a unicast message setting. This problem can be represented by a directed graph. In this paper, we first define a structure (we call generalized interlinked cycles (GIC)) in directed graphs. A GIC consists of cycles which are interlinked in some manner (i.e., not disjoint), and it turns out that the GIC is a generalization of cliques and cycles. We then propose a simple scalar linear encoding scheme with linear time encoding complexity. This scheme exploits GICs in the digraph. We prove that our scheme is optimal for a class of digraphs with message packets of any length. Moreover, we show that our scheme can outperform existing techniques, e.g., partial clique cover, local chromatic number, composite-coding, and interlinked cycle cover.Comment: Extended version of the paper which is to be presented at the IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2015 Jej