Fair Domination in Graphs

Abstract: A fair dominating set in a graph $G$ (or FD-set) is a dominating set $S$ such that all vertices not in $S$ are dominated by the same number of vertices from $S$; that is, every two vertices not in $S$ have the same number of neighbors in $S$. The fair domination number, $fd(G)$, of $G$ is the minimum cardinality of a FD-set. We present various results on the fair domination number of a graph. In particular, we show that if $G$ is a connected graph of order $n \ge 3$ with no isolated vertex, then $fd(G) \le n - 2$, and we construct an infinite family of connected graphs achieving equality in this bound. We show that if $G$ is a maximal outerplanar graph, then $fd(G) < 17n/19$. If $T$ is a tree of order $n \ge 2$, then we prove that $fd(T) \le n/2$ with equality if and only if $T$ is the corona of a tree.