A NOTE ON GENERALIZED RAINBOW CONNECTION OF CONNECTED GRAPHS AND THEIR NUMBER OF EDGES

Abstract

Let l ≥ 1, k ≥ 1 be two integers. Given an edge-coloured connected graph G. A path P in the graph G is called l-rainbow path if each subpath of length at most l + 1 is rainbow. The graph G is called (k, l)-rainbow connected if any two vertices in G are connected by at least k pairwise internally vertex-disjoint l-rainbow paths. The smallest number of colours needed in order to make G (k, l)-rainbow connected is called the (k, l)-rainbow connection number of G and denoted by rck,l(G). In this paper, we first focus to improve the upper bound of the (1, l)-rainbow connection number depending on the size of connected graphs. Using this result, we characterize all connected graphs having the large (1, 2)-rainbow connection number. Moreover, we also determine the (1, l)-rainbow connection number in a connected graph G containing a sequence of cut-edges.