Strong majority colorings of graphs

Abstract

Motivated by majority vertex-colorings of graphs and digraphs and majority edge-colorings of graphs, we introduce two concepts of strong majority colorings. A strong majority vertex-coloring of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is a mapping $c:V\to C$ such that for every vertex $v\in V$ and every color $\alpha \in C$, at most half of the neighbors of $v$ have color $\alpha$. The strong majority number of $G$, denoted Maj$(G)$, is the least number of colors in such a coloring. We show that Maj$(G)$ can be arbitrarily large and prove a tight upper bound Maj$(G)\le 2\Delta (G)+1$ for every graph $G$ without pendant vertices. A strong majority edge-coloring of a graph $G$ is a mapping $c:E\to C$ such that for every edge $e\in E$ and every color $\alpha \in C$, at most half of the edges adjacent to $e$ have color $\alpha$. The strong majority index of $G$, denoted Maj'$(G)$, is the least number of colors in such a coloring. It is shown that there is an upper constant bound for Maj'$(G)$ of all admissible graphs $G$. We conjecture that this constant is as small as 4 and confirm this conjecture for numerous graph classes.

arXiv comment13 pages, 2 figures