Fractional eternal domination: securely distributing resources across a network

04/24/2023

∙

by   Fnu Devvrit, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

This paper initiates the study of fractional eternal domination in graphs, a natural relaxation of the well-studied eternal domination problem. We study the connections to flows and linear programming in order to obtain results on the complexity of determining the fractional eternal domination number of a graph G, which we denote γ_ f^∞(G). We study the behaviour of γ_ f^∞(G) as it relates to other domination parameters. We also determine bounds on, and in some cases exact values for, γ_ f^∞(G) when G is a member of one of a variety of important graph classes, including trees, split graphs, strongly chordal graphs, Kneser graphs, abelian Cayley graphs, and graph products.