Odd Decompositions of Eulerian Graphs

Abstract

We prove that an Eulerian graph $G$ admits a decomposition into $k$ closed trails of odd length if and only if and it contains at least $k$ pairwise edge-disjoint odd circuits and $k\equiv |E(G)|\pmod{2}$. We conjecture that a connected $2d$-regular graph of odd order with $d\ge 1$ admits a decomposition into $d$ odd closed trails sharing a common vertex and verify the conjecture for $d\le 3$. The case $d=3$ is crucial for determining the flow number of a signed Eulerian graph which is treated in a separate paper [E. Macajova and M. Skoviera, SIAM J. Discrete Math., 31 (2017), pp. 1937-1952]. The proof of our conjecture for $d=3$ is surprisingly difficult and calls for the use of signed graphs as a convenient technical tool.