Power domination on triangular grids

The concept of power domination emerged from the problem of monitoring electrical systems. Given a graph G and a set S $\subseteq$ V (G), a set M of monitored vertices is built as follows: at first, M contains only the vertices of S and their direct neighbors, and then each time a vertex in M has exactly one neighbor not in M, this neighbor is added to M. The power domination number of a graph G is the minimum size of a set S such that this process ends up with the set M containing every vertex of G. We here show that the power domination number of a triangular grid T\_k with hexagonal-shape border of length k -- 1 is exactly $\lceil k/3 \rceil.Comment: Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, Jul 2017, Ottawa, Canad

The Price of Order

We present tight bounds on the spanning ratio of a large family of ordered $\theta$-graphs. A $\theta$-graph partitions the plane around each vertex into $m$ disjoint cones, each having aperture $\theta = 2 \pi/m$. An ordered $\theta$-graph is constructed by inserting the vertices one by one and connecting each vertex to the closest previously-inserted vertex in each cone. We show that for any integer $k \geq 1$, ordered $\theta$-graphs with $4k + 4$ cones have a tight spanning ratio of $1 + 2 \sin(\theta/2) / (\cos(\theta/2) - \sin(\theta/2))$. We also show that for any integer $k \geq 2$, ordered $\theta$-graphs with $4k + 2$ cones have a tight spanning ratio of $1 / (1 - 2 \sin(\theta/2))$. We provide lower bounds for ordered $\theta$-graphs with $4k + 3$ and $4k + 5$ cones. For ordered $\theta$-graphs with $4k + 2$ and $4k + 5$ cones these lower bounds are strictly greater than the worst case spanning ratios of their unordered counterparts. These are the first results showing that ordered $\theta$-graphs have worse spanning ratios than unordered $\theta$-graphs. Finally, we show that, unlike their unordered counterparts, the ordered $\theta$-graphs with 4, 5, and 6 cones are not spanners