Radio labelling of two-branch trees

Abstract

A radio labelling of a graph $G$ is a mapping $f:V(G)\to \{0,1,2,\dots \}$ such that $|f(u)-f(v)|\ge diam(G)+1-d(u,v)$ for every pair of distinct vertices $u,v$ of $G$, where $diam(G)$ is the diameter of $G$ and $d(u,v)$ is the distance between $u$ and $v$ in $G$. The radio number $rn(G)$ of $G$ is the smallest integer $k$ such that $G$ admits a radio labelling $f$ with $\max \{f(v):v\in V(G)\}=k$. The weight of a tree $T$ from a vertex $v\in V(T)$ is the sum of the distances in $T$ from $v$ to all other vertices, and a vertex of $T$ achieving the minimum weight is called a weight center of $T$. It is known that any tree has one or two weight centers. A tree is called a two-branch tree if the removal of all its weight centers results in a forest with exactly two components. In this paper we obtain a sharp lower bound for the radio number of two-branch trees which improves a known lower bound for general trees. We also give a necessary and sufficient condition for this improved lower bound to be achieved. Using these results, we determine the radio number of two families of level-wise regular two-branch trees.

29 pages, 3 figures. This is a final version published in the Applied Mathematics and Computation Journal