Rainbow Matching in Edge-Colored Graphs

Abstract

A rainbow subgraph of an edge-colored graph is a subgraph whose edges have distinct colors. The color degree of a vertex $v$ is the number of different colors on edges incident to $v$. Wang and Li conjectured that for $k\geq 4$, every edge-colored graph with minimum color degree at least $k$ contains a rainbow matching of size at least $\left\lceil k/2 \right\rceil$. We prove the slightly weaker statement that a rainbow matching of size at least $\left\lfloor k/2 \right\rfloor$ is guaranteed. We also give sufficient conditions for a rainbow matching of size at least $\left\lceil k/2 \right\rceil$ that fail to hold only for finitely many exceptions (for each odd $k$).