On the Burning Number of $p$-Caterpillars

Abstract: The burning number is a recently introduced graph parameter indicating the spreading speed of content in a graph through its edges. While the conjectured upper bound on the necessary numbers of time steps until all vertices are reached is proven for some specific graph classes it remains open for trees in general. We present two different proofs for ordinary caterpillars and prove the conjecture for a generalised version of caterpillars and for trees with a sufficient amount of leaves. Furthermore, determining the burning number for spider graphs, trees with maximum degree three and path-forests is known to be $\mathcal{NP}$-complete, however, we show that the complexity is already inherent in caterpillars with maximum degree three.