Strong chromatic index of k-degenerate graphs

A {\em strong edge coloring} of a graph $G$ is a proper edge coloring in which every color class is an induced matching. The {\em strong chromatic index} \chiup_{s}'(G) of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of colors in a strong edge coloring of $G$. In this note, we improve a result by D{\k e}bski \etal [Strong chromatic index of sparse graphs, arXiv:1301.1992v1] and show that the strong chromatic index of a $k$-degenerate graph $G$ is at most $(4k-2) \cdot \Delta(G) - 2k^{2} + 1$. As a direct consequence, the strong chromatic index of a $2$-degenerate graph $G$ is at most $6\Delta(G) - 7$, which improves the upper bound $10\Delta(G) - 10$ by Chang and Narayanan [Strong chromatic index of 2-degenerate graphs, J. Graph Theory 73 (2013) (2) 119--126]. For a special subclass of $2$-degenerate graphs, we obtain a better upper bound, namely if $G$ is a graph such that all of its $3^{+}$-vertices induce a forest, then \chiup_{s}'(G) \leq 4 \Delta(G) -3; as a corollary, every minimally $2$-connected graph $G$ has strong chromatic index at most $4 \Delta(G) - 3$. Moreover, all the results in this note are best possible in some sense.Comment: 3 pages in Discrete Mathematics, 201

The strong chromatic index of 1-planar graphs

The chromatic index $\chi'(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the smallest $k$ for which $G$ admits an edge $k$-coloring such that any two adjacent edges have distinct colors. The strong chromatic index $\chi'_s(G)$ of $G$ is the smallest $k$ such that $G$ has a proper edge $k$-coloring with the condition that any two edges at distance at most 2 receive distinct colors. A graph is 1-planar if it can be drawn in the plane so that each edge is crossed by at most one other edge. In this paper, we show that every graph $G$ with maximum average degree $\bar{d}(G)$ has $\chi'_{s}(G)\le (2\bar{d}(G)-1)\chi'(G)$. As a corollary, we prove that every 1-planar graph $G$ with maximum degree $\Delta$ has $\chi'_{\rm s}(G)\le 14\Delta$, which improves a result, due to Bensmail et al., which says that $\chi'_{\rm s}(G)\le 24\Delta$ if $\Delta\ge 56$