Product irregularity strength of graphs with small clique cover number

Abstract

For a graph $X$ without isolated vertices and without isolated edges, a product-irregular labelling $\omega:E(X)\rightarrow \{1,2,\ldots,s\}$, first defined by Anholcer in 2009, is a labelling of the edges of $X$ such that for any two distinct vertices $u$ and $v$ of $X$ the product of labels of the edges incident with $u$ is different from the product of labels of the edges incident with $v$. The minimal $s$ for which there exist a product irregular labeling is called the product irregularity strength of $X$ and is denoted by $ps(X)$. Clique cover number of a graph is the minimum number of cliques that partition its vertex-set. In this paper we prove that connected graphs with clique cover number $2$ or $3$ have the product-irregularity strength equal to $3$, with some small exceptions.