Backbone colorings along stars and matchings in split graphs: their span is close to the chromatic number
We continue the study on backbone colorings, a variation on classical vertex colorings that was introduced at WG2003. Given a graph G = (V,E) and a spanning subgraph H of G (the backbone of G), a λ-backbone coloring for G and H is a proper vertex coloring V→ {1,2,...} of G in which the colors assigned to adjacent vertices in H differ by at least λ. The algorithmic and combinatorial properties of backbone colorings have been studied for various types of backbones in a number of papers. The main outcome...