Bounds on the Burning Number

TL;DR

This paper investigates bounds on the burning number, a measure of contagion spread speed in graphs, providing new upper bounds for connected graphs and trees, and characterizing certain binary trees with specific burning numbers.

Contribution

The paper introduces improved upper bounds on the burning number for connected graphs and trees, and characterizes binary trees with a given depth that attain a specific burning number.

Findings

Established new upper bounds for the burning number of connected graphs.

Derived bounds for the burning number of trees based on degree counts.

Characterized binary trees of depth r with burning number r+1.

Abstract

Motivated by a graph theoretic process intended to measure the speed of the spread of contagion in a graph, Bonato, Janssen, and Roshanbin [Burning a Graph as a Model of Social Contagion, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8882 (2014) 13-22] define the burning number $b(G)$ of a graph $G$ as the smallest integer $k$ for which there are vertices $x_1,\ldots,x_k$ such that for every vertex $u$ of $G$, there is some $i\in \{ 1,\ldots,k\}$ with ${\rm dist}_G(u,x_i)\leq k-i$, and ${\rm dist}_G(x_i,x_j)\geq j-i$ for every $i,j\in \{ 1,\ldots,k\}$. For a connected graph $G$ of order $n$, they prove that $b(G)\leq 2\left\lceil\sqrt{n}\right\rceil-1$, and conjecture $b(G)\leq \left\lceil\sqrt{n}\right\rceil$. We show that $b(G)\leq \sqrt{\frac{32}{19}\cdot \frac{n}{1-\epsilon}}+\sqrt{\frac{27}{19\epsilon}}$ and $b(G)\leq \sqrt{\frac{12n}{7}}+3\approx 1.309 \sqrt{n}+3$ for every connected graph $G$ of order $n$ and every $0<\epsilon<1$. For a tree $T$ of order $n$ with $n_2$ vertices of degree $2$, and $n_{\geq 3}$ vertices of degree at least $3$, we show $b(T)\leq \left\lceil\sqrt{(n+n_2)+\frac{1}{4}}+\frac{1}{2}\right\rceil$ and $b(T)\leq \left\lceil\sqrt{n}\right\rceil+n_{\geq 3}$. Furthermore, we characterize the binary trees of depth $r$ that have burning number $r+1$.