The complexity of frugal colouring

Abstract

AbstractA t-frugal colouring of a graph G is an assignment of colours to the vertices of G, such that each colour appears at most t times in the neighbourhood of any vertex. A dichotomy theorem for the complexity of deciding whether a graph has a 1-frugal colouring with k colours was found by McCormick and Thomas, and then later extended to restricted graph classes by Kratochvil and Siggers. We generalize the McCormick and Thomas theorem by proving a dichotomy theorem for the complexity of deciding whether a graph has a t-frugal colouring with k colours, for all pairs of positive integers t and k. We also generalize bounds of Lih et al. for the number of colours needed in a 1-frugal colouring of a given $$K_4$$ K 4 -minor-free graph with maximum degree $$\Delta $$ Δ to t-frugal colourings, for any positive integer t.