On Edge-balanced Multigraphs

Bor-Liang Chen1, Kuo-Ching Huang2, Sin-Min Lee3, Shi-Shan Liu 4
1Department of Mathematics, Taichung Technology University, Taichung, Taiwan.
2 Department of Applied Mathematics Providence University Shalu, Taichung, Taiwan
3Department of Mathematics and Computer Science San Jose State University, San Jose, CA 95192, U.S.A.
4Deparment of Mathematics, Inner Mongolia University Hoerhaote, Inner Mongolia, The People’s Republic of China

Abstract

A new graph labeling problem on simple graphs called edge-balanced labeling is introduced by Kong and Lee [11]. They conjectured that all trees except \(K_{1,n}\) where \(n\) is odd, and all connected regular graphs except \(K_2\) are edge-balanced. In this paper, we extend the concept of edge-balanced labeling to multigraphs and completely characterize the edge-balanced multigraphs. Thus, we proved that the above two conjectures are true. A byproduct of this result is a proof that the problem of deciding whether a graph is edge-balanced does not belong to NP-hard.