Rainbow Vertex-Connection and Forbidden Subgraphs

Abstract

A path in a vertex-colored graph is called vertex-rainbow if its internal vertices have pairwise distinct colors. A vertex-colored graph G is rainbow vertex-connected if for any two distinct vertices of G, there is a vertex-rainbow path connecting them. For a connected graph G, the rainbow vertex-connection number of G, denoted by rvc(G), is defined as the minimum number of colors that are required to make G rainbow vertex-connected. In this paper, we find all the families ℱ of connected graphs with |ℱ| ∈ {1, 2}, for which there is a constant kℱ such that, for every connected ℱ-free graph G, rvc(G) ≤ diam(G) + kℱ, where diam(G) is the diameter of G.

Keywords

• vertex-rainbow path
• rainbow vertex-connection
• forbidden sub-graphs
• 05c15
• 05c35
• 05c38
• 05c40