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On Strong Domination in Graphs

Johannes H. Hattingh 1, Michael A. Henning2
1Department of Mathematics Rand Afrikaans University P.O. Box 524 Auckland Park 2006 South Africa
2 Department of Mathematics University of Natal Private Bag X01 Pietermaritzburg 3209 South Africa

Abstract

Let \(G = (V, E)\) be a graph. A vertex \(u\) strongly dominates a vertex \(v\) if \(uv \in E\) and \(\deg(u) > \deg(v)\). A set \(S \subseteq V\) is a strong dominating set of \(G\) if every vertex in \(V – S\) is strongly dominated by at least one vertex of \(S\).

The minimum cardinality among all strong dominating sets of \(G\) is called the strong domination number of \(G\) and is denoted by \(\gamma_{st}(G)\). This parameter was introduced by Sampathkumar and Pushpa Latha in [4].

In this paper, we investigate sharp upper bounds on the strong domination number for a tree and a connected graph. We show that for any tree \(T\) of order \(p > 2\) that is different from the tree obtained from a star \(K_{1,3}\) by subdividing each edge once,
\(\gamma_{st}(T) \leq \frac{4p – 1}{7}\)
and this bound is sharp.

For any connected graph \(G\) of order \(p \geq 3\), it is shown that \(\gamma_{st}(G) \leq \frac{2(p – 1)}{3}\) and this bound is sharp. We show that the decision problem corresponding to the computation of \(\gamma_{st}\) is NP-complete, even for bipartite or chordal graphs.