Decomposing Degenerate Graphs into Locally Irregular Subgraphs

Abstract

A (undirected) graph is locally irregular if no two of its adjacent vertices have the same degree. A decomposition of a graph G into k locally irregular subgraphs is a partition E_1,...,E_k of E(G) into k parts each of which induces a locally irregular subgraph. Not all graphs decompose into locally irregular subgraphs; however, it was conjectured that, whenever a graph does, it should admit such a decomposition into at most three locally irregular subgraphs. This conjecture was verified for a few graph classes in recent years. This work is dedicated to the decomposability of degenerate graphs with low degeneracy. Our main result is that decomposable k-degenerate graphs decompose into at most 3k+1 locally irregular subgraphs, which improves on previous results whenever k≤9. We improve this result further for some specific classes of degenerate graphs, such as bipartite cacti, k-trees, and planar graphs. Although our results provide only little progress towards the leading conjecture above, the main contribution of this work is rather the decomposition schemes and methods we introduce to prove these results.