On the structure of dominating graphs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structure of dominating graphs, characterizes when a graph is a dominating graph, and proves finiteness results for certain classes of dominating graphs, including cycles and regular graphs.

Contribution

It provides a characterization of dominating graphs without isolates and establishes finiteness results for regular and cycle dominating graphs.

Findings

If a graph is isomorphic to its own dominating graph without isolates, then it is a star graph with specific parameters.

Only finitely many r-regular, connected dominating graphs exist for a given r.

C6 and C8 are the only dominating graphs among cycles.

Abstract

The $k$-dominating graph $D_k(G)$ of a graph $G$ is defined on the vertex set consisting of dominating sets of $G$ with cardinality at most $k$, two such sets being adjacent if they differ by either adding or deleting a single vertex. A graph is a dominating graph if it is isomorphic to $D_k(G)$ for some graph $G$ and some positive integer $k$. Answering a question of Haas and Seyffarth for graphs without isolates, it is proved that if $G$ is such a graph of order $n\ge 2$ and with $G\cong D_k(G)$, then $k=2$ and $G=K_{1,n-1}$ for some $n\ge 4$. It is also proved that for a given $r$ there exist only a finite number of $r$-regular, connected dominating graphs of connected graphs. In particular, $C_6$ and $C_8$ are the only dominating graphs in the class of cycles. Some results on the order of dominating graphs are also obtained.