4,632 research outputs found
Topological lower bounds for the chromatic number: A hierarchy
This paper is a study of ``topological'' lower bounds for the chromatic
number of a graph. Such a lower bound was first introduced by Lov\'asz in 1978,
in his famous proof of the \emph{Kneser conjecture} via Algebraic Topology.
This conjecture stated that the \emph{Kneser graph} \KG_{m,n}, the graph with
all -element subsets of as vertices and all pairs of
disjoint sets as edges, has chromatic number . Several other proofs
have since been published (by B\'ar\'any, Schrijver, Dolnikov, Sarkaria, Kriz,
Greene, and others), all of them based on some version of the Borsuk--Ulam
theorem, but otherwise quite different. Each can be extended to yield some
lower bound on the chromatic number of an arbitrary graph. (Indeed, we observe
that \emph{every} finite graph may be represented as a generalized Kneser
graph, to which the above bounds apply.)
We show that these bounds are almost linearly ordered by strength, the
strongest one being essentially Lov\'asz' original bound in terms of a
neighborhood complex. We also present and compare various definitions of a
\emph{box complex} of a graph (developing ideas of Alon, Frankl, and Lov\'asz
and of \kriz). A suitable box complex is equivalent to Lov\'asz' complex, but
the construction is simpler and functorial, mapping graphs with homomorphisms
to -spaces with -maps.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure. Jahresbericht der DMV, to appea
Performance of distributed mechanisms for flow admission in wireless adhoc networks
Given a wireless network where some pairs of communication links interfere
with each other, we study sufficient conditions for determining whether a given
set of minimum bandwidth quality-of-service (QoS) requirements can be
satisfied. We are especially interested in algorithms which have low
communication overhead and low processing complexity. The interference in the
network is modeled using a conflict graph whose vertices correspond to the
communication links in the network. Two links are adjacent in this graph if and
only if they interfere with each other due to being in the same vicinity and
hence cannot be simultaneously active. The problem of scheduling the
transmission of the various links is then essentially a fractional, weighted
vertex coloring problem, for which upper bounds on the fractional chromatic
number are sought using only localized information. We recall some distributed
algorithms for this problem, and then assess their worst-case performance. Our
results on this fundamental problem imply that for some well known classes of
networks and interference models, the performance of these distributed
algorithms is within a bounded factor away from that of an optimal, centralized
algorithm. The performance bounds are simple expressions in terms of graph
invariants. It is seen that the induced star number of a network plays an
important role in the design and performance of such networks.Comment: 21 pages, submitted. Journal version of arXiv:0906.378
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