Upper bound for the rainbow connection number of bridgeless graphs with diameter 3

Hengzhe Li, Xueliang Li, Yuefang Sun

Published 2011-09-13, updated 2011-10-13Version 2

A path in an edge-colored graph $G$, where adjacent edges may have the same color, is called rainbow if no two edges of the path are colored the same. The rainbow connection number $rc(G)$ of $G$ is the smallest integer $k$ for which there exists a $k$-edge-coloring of $G$ such that every pair of distinct vertices of $G$ is connected by a rainbow path. It is known that for every integer $k\geq 2$ deciding if a graph $G$ has $rc(G)\leq k$ is NP-Hard, and a graph $G$ with $rc(G)\leq k$ has diameter $diam(G)\leq k$. In foregoing papers, we showed that a bridgeless graph with diameter 2 has rainbow connection number at most 5. In this paper, we prove that a bridgeless graph with diameter 3 has rainbow connection number at most 9. We also prove that for any bridgeless graph $G$ with radius $r$, if every edge of $G$ is contained in a triangle, then $rc(G)\leq 3r$. As an application, we get that for any graph $G$ with minimum degree at least 3, $rc(L(G))\leq 3 rad(L(G))\leq 3 (rad(G)+1)$.