Rainbow connection numbers of complementary graphs

Abstract

A path in an edge-colored graph, where adjacent edges may be colored the same, is a rainbow path if no two edges of it are colored the same. A nontrivial connected graph $G$ is rainbow connected if there is a rainbow path connecting any two vertices, and the rainbow connection number of $G$, denoted by $rc(G)$, is the minimum number of colors that are needed in order to make $G$ rainbow connected. In this paper, we provide a new approach to investigate the rainbow connection number of a graph $G$ according to some constraints to its complement graph $\bar{G}$. We first derive that for a connected graph $G$, if $\bar{G}$ does not belong to the following two cases: $(i)$~$diam(\bar{G})=2,3$, $(ii)~\bar{G}$ contains exactly two connected components and one of them is trivial, then $rc(G)\leq 4$, where $diam(G)$ is the diameter of $G$. Examples are given to show that this bound is best possible. Next we derive that for a connected graph $G$, if $\bar{G}$ is triangle-free, then $rc(G)\leq 6$.