Some Results on incidence coloring, star arboricity and domination number

Two inequalities bridging the three isolated graph invariants, incidence chromatic number, star arboricity and domination number, were established. Consequently, we deduced an upper bound and a lower bound of the incidence chromatic number for all graphs. Using these bounds, we further reduced the upper bound of the incidence chromatic number of planar graphs and showed that cubic graphs with orders not divisible by four are not 4-incidence colorable. The incidence chromatic numbers of Cartesian product, join and union of graphs were also determined.Comment: 8 page

Star 5-edge-colorings of subcubic multigraphs

The star chromatic index of a multigraph $G$, denoted $\chi'_{s}(G)$, is the minimum number of colors needed to properly color the edges of $G$ such that no path or cycle of length four is bi-colored. A multigraph $G$ is star $k$-edge-colorable if $\chi'_{s}(G)\le k$. Dvo\v{r}\'ak, Mohar and \v{S}\'amal [Star chromatic index, J Graph Theory 72 (2013), 313--326] proved that every subcubic multigraph is star $7$-edge-colorable, and conjectured that every subcubic multigraph should be star $6$-edge-colorable. Kerdjoudj, Kostochka and Raspaud considered the list version of this problem for simple graphs and proved that every subcubic graph with maximum average degree less than $7/3$ is star list-$5$-edge-colorable. It is known that a graph with maximum average degree $14/5$ is not necessarily star $5$-edge-colorable. In this paper, we prove that every subcubic multigraph with maximum average degree less than $12/5$ is star $5$-edge-colorable.Comment: to appear in Discrete Mathematics. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1701.0410

Towards on-line Ohba's conjecture

The on-line choice number of a graph is a variation of the choice number defined through a two person game. It is at least as large as the choice number for all graphs and is strictly larger for some graphs. In particular, there are graphs $G$ with $|V(G)| = 2 \chi(G)+1$ whose on-line choice numbers are larger than their chromatic numbers, in contrast to a recently confirmed conjecture of Ohba that every graph $G$ with $|V(G)| \le 2 \chi(G)+1$ has its choice number equal its chromatic number. Nevertheless, an on-line version of Ohba conjecture was proposed in [P. Huang, T. Wong and X. Zhu, Application of polynomial method to on-line colouring of graphs, European J. Combin., 2011]: Every graph $G$ with $|V(G)| \le 2 \chi(G)$ has its on-line choice number equal its chromatic number. This paper confirms the on-line version of Ohba conjecture for graphs $G$ with independence number at most 3. We also study list colouring of complete multipartite graphs $K_{3\star k}$ with all parts of size 3. We prove that the on-line choice number of $K_{3 \star k}$ is at most $3/2k$, and present an alternate proof of Kierstead's result that its choice number is $\lceil (4k-1)/3 \rceil$. For general graphs $G$, we prove that if $|V(G)| \le \chi(G)+\sqrt{\chi(G)}$ then its on-line choice number equals chromatic number.Comment: new abstract and introductio