All Subgraphs of a Wheel are 5-Coupled-Choosable

Abstract

A wheel graph consists of a cycle along with a center vertex connected to every vertex in the cycle. In this paper we show that every subgraph of a wheel graph has list coupled chromatic number at most 5, and this coloring can be found in linear time. We further show that `5' is tight for every wheel graph with at least 5 vertices, and briefly discuss possible generalizations to planar graphs of treewidth 3.