The scramble number of outerplanar graphs

Abstract

For planar graphs, it is known that their treewidth is bounded by $O(\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ is the number of vertices of the graph. A related invariant to treewidth, is the scramble number of graphs. Recently, Connor et. al proved that planar graphs of bounded maximal degree have scramble number bounded by $O(\sqrt{n})$. An open question is whether the scramble number of any planar graph follows this same bound. We give a definitive answer with an explicit bound for a subset of planar graphs, the simple outerplanar graphs and the simple near outerplanar graphs.

13 pages, 3 figures