Complexity of Ck-coloring in hereditary classes of graphs

Abstract

For a graph F, a graph G is F-free if it does not contain an induced subgraph isomorphic to F. For two graphs G and H, an H-coloring of G is a mapping f : V (G) → V (H) such that for every edge uv ∈ E(G) it holds that f(u)f(v) ∈ E(H). We are interested in the complexity of the problem H-Coloring, which asks for the existence of an H-coloring of an input graph G. In particular, we consider H-Coloring of F-free graphs, where F is a fixed graph and H is an odd cycle of length at least 5. This problem is closely related to the well known open problem of determining the complexity of 3-Coloring of Pt-free graphs. We show that for every odd k ≥ 5, the Ck-Coloring problem, even in the list variant, can be solved in polynomial time in P9 free graphs. The algorithm extends to the list version of Ck-Coloring, where k ≥ 10 is an even number. On the other hand, we prove that if some component of F is not a subgraph of a subdivided claw, then the following problems are NP-complete in F-free graphs: a) the precoloring extension version of Ck-Coloring for every odd k ≥ 5; b) the list version of Ck-Coloring for every even k ≥ 6.