Cubicity, Degeneracy, and Crossing Number
arXiv:1105.5225
Abstract
A -box , where each is a closed interval on the real line, is defined to be the Cartesian product . If each is a unit length interval, we call a -cube. Boxicity of a graph , denoted as $\boxi(G)$, is the minimum integer such that is an intersection graph of -boxes. Similarly, the cubicity of , denoted as $\cubi(G)$, is the minimum integer such that is an intersection graph of -cubes. It was shown in [L. Sunil Chandran, Mathew C. Francis, and Naveen Sivadasan: Representing graphs as the intersection of axis-parallel cubes. MCDES-2008, IISc Centenary Conference, available at CoRR, abs/cs/ 0607092, 2006.] that, for a graph with maximum degree , $\cubi(G)\leq \lceil 4(Δ+1)\log n\rceil$. In this paper, we show that, for a -degenerate graph , $\cubi(G) \leq (k+2) \lceil 2e \log n \rceil$. Since is at most and can be much lower, this clearly is a stronger result. This bound is tight. We also give an efficient deterministic algorithm that runs in time to output a dimensional cube representation for . An important consequence of the above result is that if the crossing number of a graph is , then $\boxi(G)$ is . This bound is tight up to a factor of . We also show that, if has vertices, then $\cubi(G)$ is . Using our bound for the cubicity of -degenerate graphs we show that cubicity of almost all graphs in model is , where denotes the average degree of the graph under consideration.
21 pages