Generalization of Schnyder woods to orientable surfaces and applications

Abstract: Schnyder woods are particularly elegant combinatorial structures with numerous applications concerning planar triangulations and more generally 3-connected planar maps. We propose a simple generalization of Schnyder woods from the plane to maps on orientable surfaces of any genus with a special emphasis on the toroidal case. We provide a natural partition of the set of Schnyder woods of a given map into distributive lattices depending on the surface homology. In the toroidal case we show the existence of particular Schnyder woods with some global properties that are useful for optimal encoding or graph drawing purpose.