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Discussiones Mathematicae Graph Theory 23(2) (2003) 261-272
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7151/dmgt.1201

IMPROVING SOME BOUNDS FOR DOMINATING CARTESIAN PRODUCTS

Bert L. Hartnell Saint Mary's University Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3C3

Douglas F. Rall Furman University Greenville, SC 29613, USA

Abstract

The study of domination in Cartesian products has received its main motivation from attempts to settle a conjecture made by V.G. Vizing in 1968. He conjectured that γ (G)γ (H) is a lower bound for the domination number of the Cartesian product of any two graphs G and H. Most of the progress on settling this conjecture has been limited to verifying the conjectured lower bound if one of the graphs has a certain structural property.

In addition, a number of authors have established bounds for dominating the Cartesian product of any two graphs. We show how it is possible to improve some of these bounds by imposing conditions on both graphs. For example, we establish a new lower bound for the domination number of T T, when T is a tree, and we improve an upper bound of Vizing in the case when one of the graphs has k > 1 dominating sets which cover the vertex set and the other has a dominating set which partitions in a certain way.

Keywords: domination number, Cartesian product, Vizing's conjecture, 2-packing.

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 05C69. ˘

References

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Received 1 October 2001
Revised 20 January 2002