A bijection for plane graphs and its applications

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the counting and random sampling of plane graphs (simple planar graphs embedded in the plane). Our main result is a bijection between the class of plane graphs with triangular outer face, and a class of oriented binary trees. The number of edges and vertices of the plane graph can be tracked through the bijection. Consequently, we obtain counting formulas and an efficient random sampling algorithm for rooted plane graphs (with arbitrary outer face) according to the number of edges and vertices. We also obtain a bijective link, via a bijection of Bona, between rooted plane graphs and 1342-avoiding permutations.