Independent 2-rainbow domination in trees

Abstract

A 2-rainbow dominating function (2RDF) on a graph G is a function f from the vertex set V(G) to the set of all subsets of the set {1, 2} such that for any vertex v ∈ V(G) with f(v) = ∅ the condition ⋃u∈N(v)f(u) = {1, 2} is fulfilled. A 2RDF f is independent 2-rainbow dominating function (I2RDF) if no two vertices assigned nonempty sets are adjacent. The weight of a 2RDF f is the value ω(f) = ∑v∈V |f(v)|. The 2-rainbow domination number γr2(G) (respectively, the independent 2-rainbow domination number ir2(G)) is the minimum weight of a 2RDF (respectively, I2RDF) on G. M. Chellali and N. Jafari Rad [Independent 2-rainbow domination in graphs, to appear in J. Combin. Math. Combin. Comput.] have studied the independent 2-rainbow domination numbers in graphs and posed the following problem: Find a sharp bound for ir2(T) in terms of the order of a tree T. In this paper we prove that for every tree T of order n ≥ 3, [Formula: see text].