Arboricity-Dependent Algorithms for Edge Coloring

Abstract

The problem of edge coloring has been extensively studied over the years. Recently, this problem has received significant attention in the dynamic setting, where we are given a dynamic graph evolving via a sequence of edge insertions and deletions and our objective is to maintain an edge coloring of the graph. Currently, it is not known whether it is possible to maintain a $(\Delta+ O(\Delta^{1 - \mu}))$-edge coloring in $\tilde{O}(1)$ update time, for any constant $\mu > 0$, where $\Delta$ is the maximum degree of the graph. In this paper, we show how to efficiently maintain a $(\Delta + O(\alpha))$-edge coloring in $\tilde O(1)$ amortized update time, where $\alpha$ is the arboricty of the graph. Thus, we answer this question in the affirmative for graphs of sufficiently small arboricity.