New Upper Bounds on the Distance Domination Numbers of Grids

Abstract

In his 1992 Ph.D. thesis Chang identified an efficient way to dominate $m \times n$ grid graphs and conjectured that his construction gives the most efficient dominating sets for relatively large grids. In 2011 Gon\c{c}alves, Pinlou, Rao, and Thomass\'e proved Chang's conjecture, establishing a closed formula for the domination number of a grid. In March 2013 Fata, Smith and Sundaram established upper bounds for the $k$-distance domination numbers of grid graphs by generalizing Chang's construction of dominating sets to $k$-distance dominating sets. In this paper we improve the upper bounds established by Fata, Smith, and Sundaram for the $k$-distance domination numbers of grids.