Domination in Graphs of Minimum Degree Four

Sohn Moo Young and Xudong Yuan
Department of Mathematics, Guangxi Normal University,
Guilin 541004
P.R.China


Abstract    
Let (G) denote the minimum degree of graph G. An early result of Ore (see [5]) states that (G) n/2 if G is a graph of order $n$ with the minimum degree at least one. This result was improved as (G) 2n/5 by McCraig and Shepherd in [4] for the connected graph G which has minimum degree at least two and is not one of seven exceptional graphs. Reed in [7] considered the case for the graphs with minimum degree at least three, and obtained that (G) 3n/8. In this direction, an obvious conjecture (see [5]) seems to be that for any graph G with (G) k, (G) kn/(3k-1). However, for (G)7, Caro and Roditty (see [9, 10]) gave the following better bound.

Theorem 0.3. For any graph G,


Thus, the question remains open only for graphs G with 4 (G) 6. In this paper, by using the so-called vertex disjoint paths cover introduced by Reed, we prove that every graph on $n$ vertices of minimum degree at least four has a dominating set of at most 4n/11 vertices.

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