Coloring Graphs to Produce Properly Colored Walks

Abstract

For a connected graph, we define the proper-walk connection number as the minimum number of colors needed to color the edges of a graph so that there is a walk between every pair of vertices without two consecutive edges having the same color. We show that the proper-walk connection number is at most three for all cyclic graphs, and at most two for bridgeless graphs. We also characterize the bipartite graphs that have proper-walk connection number equal to two, and show that this characterization also holds for the analogous problem where one is restricted to properly colored paths.