Oriented coloring of graphs with low maximum degree

05/29/2019

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by   Pascal Ochem, et al.

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Duffy et al. [C. Duffy, G. MacGillivray, and É. Sopena, Oriented colourings of graphs with maximum degree three and four, Discrete Mathematics, 342(4), p. 959--974, 2019] recently considered the oriented chromatic number of connected oriented graphs with maximum degree 3 and 4, proving it is at most 9 and 69, respectively. In this paper, we improve these results by showing that the oriented chromatic number of non-necessarily connected oriented graphs with maximum degree 3 (resp. 4) is at most 9 (resp. 26). The bound of 26 actually follows from a general result which determines properties of a target graph to be universal for graphs of bounded maximum degree. This generalization also allows us to get the upper bound of 90 (resp. 306, 1322) for the oriented chromatic number of graphs with maximum degree 5 (resp. 6, 7).