Power domination in maximal planar graphs

Power domination in graphs emerged from the problem of monitoring an electrical system by placing as few measurement devices in the system as possible. It corresponds to a variant of domination that includes the possibility of propagation. For measurement devices placed on a set S of vertices of a graph G, the set of monitored vertices is initially the set S together with all its neighbors. Then iteratively, whenever some monitored vertex v has a single neighbor u not yet monitored, u gets monitored. A set S is said to be a power dominating set of the graph G if all vertices of G eventually are monitored. The power domination number of a graph is the minimum size of a power dominating set. In this paper, we prove that any maximal planar graph of order n $\ge$ 6 admits a power dominating set of size at most (n--2)/4

Reconfiguration on sparse graphs

A vertex-subset graph problem Q defines which subsets of the vertices of an input graph are feasible solutions. A reconfiguration variant of a vertex-subset problem asks, given two feasible solutions S and T of size k, whether it is possible to transform S into T by a sequence of vertex additions and deletions such that each intermediate set is also a feasible solution of size bounded by k. We study reconfiguration variants of two classical vertex-subset problems, namely Independent Set and Dominating Set. We denote the former by ISR and the latter by DSR. Both ISR and DSR are PSPACE-complete on graphs of bounded bandwidth and W[1]-hard parameterized by k on general graphs. We show that ISR is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by k when the input graph is of bounded degeneracy or nowhere-dense. As a corollary, we answer positively an open question concerning the parameterized complexity of the problem on graphs of bounded treewidth. Moreover, our techniques generalize recent results showing that ISR is fixed-parameter tractable on planar graphs and graphs of bounded degree. For DSR, we show the problem fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by k when the input graph does not contain large bicliques, a class of graphs which includes graphs of bounded degeneracy and nowhere-dense graphs

Bounding the Porous Exponential Domination Number of Apollonian Networks

Given a graph G with vertex set V, a subset S of V is a dominating set if every vertex in V is either in S or adjacent to some vertex in S. The size of a smallest dominating set is called the domination number of G. We study a variant of domination called porous exponential domination in which each vertex v of V is assigned a weight by each vertex s of S that decreases exponentially as the distance between v and s increases. S is a porous exponential dominating set for G if all vertices in S distribute to vertices in G a total weight of at least 1. The porous exponential domination number of G is the size of a smallest porous exponential dominating set. In this paper we compute bounds for the porous exponential domination number of special graphs known as Apollonian networks.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, Research partially funded by CURM, the Center for Undergraduate Research, and NSF grant DMS-114869