Metric dimension and edge metric dimension of unicyclic graphs

Abstract

The metric (resp. edge metric) dimension of a simple connected graph $G$, denoted by dim$(G)$ (resp. edim$(G)$), is the cardinality of a smallest vertex subset $S\subseteq V(G)$ for which every two distinct vertices (resp. edges) in $G$ have distinct distances to a vertex of $S$. It is an interesting topic to discuss the relation between dim$(G)$ and edim$(G)$ for some class of graphs $G$. In this paper, we settle two open problems on this topic for a widely studied class of graphs, called unicyclic graphs. Specifically, we introduce four classes of subgraphs to characterize the structure of a unicyclic graph whose metric (resp . edge metric) dimension is equal to the lower bound on this invariant for unicyclic graphs. Based on this, we determine the exact values of dim$(G)$ and edim$(G)$ for all unicyclic graphs $G$.