On Total Bondage Number of Graphs

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the concept of total bondage in finite graphs without isolated vertices. A vertex set $D$ is considered a total dominating set if every vertex $v$ in the graph $G$ has a neighbor in $D$. The minimum cardinality of all total dominating sets in $G$ is denoted as $\gamma_t(G)$. A total bondage edge set $B$ is a subset of the edges of $G$ such that the removal of $B$ from $G$ does not create isolated vertices, and the total dominating number of the resulting graph $G-B$ is strictly greater than $\gamma_t(G)$. The total bondage number of $G$, denoted $b_t(G)$, is defined as the minimum cardinality of such total bondage edge sets. Our paper establishes upper bounds on $b_t(G)$ based on the maximum degree of a graph. Notably, for planar graphs with minimum degree $\delta(G) \geq 3$, we prove $b_t(G) \leq \Delta + 8$ or $b_t(G) \leq 10$. Additionally, for a connected planar graph with $\delta(G) \geq 3$ and $g(G) \geq 4$, we show that $b_t(G) \leq \Delta + 3$ if $G$ does not contain an edge with degree sum at most 7. We also improve some upper bounds of the total bondage number for trees, enhance existing lemmas, and find upper bounds for total bondage in specific graph classes.