Recognizing and drawing IC-planar graphs

Abstract

We give new results about the relationship between 1-planar graphs and RACgraphs. A graph is 1-planar if it has a drawing where each edge is crossed at most once. A graph is RAC if it can be drawn in such a way that its edges cross only at right angles. These two classes of graphs and their relationships have been widely investigated in the last years, due to their relevance in application domains where computing readable graph layouts is important to analyze or design relational data sets. We study IC-planar graphs, the sub-family of 1-planar graphs that admit 1-planar drawings with independent crossings (i.e., no two crossed edges share an endpoint). We prove that every IC-planar graph admits a straight-line RAC drawing, which may require however exponential area. If we do not require right angle crossings, we can draw every IC-planar graph with straight-line edges in linear time and quadratic area. We then study the problem of testing whether a graph is IC-planar. We prove that this problem is NP-hard, even if a rotation system for the graph is fixed. On the positive side, we describe a polynomial-time algorithm that tests whether a triangulated plane graph augmented with a given set of edges that form a matching is IC-planar.