A weighted cycle-localization inequality

Abstract

In 1959, Erdős and Gallai showed that every $2$-connected graph $G$ contains a cycle of length at least $\frac{2|E(G)|}{|V(G)|-1}$. This result was subsequently extended to weighted graphs by Bondy and Fan in 1991. A natural local variant of this problem arises by considering, for each edge $e\in E(G)$, the quantity $c(e)$, defined as the length of the longest cycle in $G$ containing $e$ (with $c(e)=2$ if $e$ is a bridge). Zhao and Zhang recently proved that for every graph $G$ on $n$ vertices satisfies ${\sum }_{e\in E(G)}\frac{1}{c(e)}\le \frac{n-1}{2}.$ In this note, we establish a weighted generalization of this inequality. For a weighted graph $(G,w)$ with positive edge weights, let $C_w(e)$ denote the maximum weight of a cycle containing $e$ (setting $C_w(e)=2w(e)$ if $e$ is a bridge). We prove that $$\sum _{e\in E(G)}\frac{w(e)}{C_w(e)}\le \frac{n-1}{2}.$$ Our result can be viewed as a weighted local analogue of the Bondy-Fan theorem, thereby establishing a correspondence between the global and local perspectives. Furthermore, we present a broad class of graphs attaining equality and derive necessary conditions for equality.