Outer-(ap)RAC Graphs

Abstract

An \emph{outer-RAC drawing} of a graph is a straight-line drawing where all vertices are incident to the outer cell and all edge crossings occur at a right angle. If additionally, all crossing edges are either horizontal or vertical, we call the drawing \emph{outer-apRAC} (\emph{ap} for \emph{axis-parallel)}. A graph is outer-(ap)RAC if it admits an outer-(ap)RAC drawing. We investigate the class of outer-(ap)RAC graphs. We show that the outer-RAC graphs are a proper subset of~the planar graphs with at most $2.5n-4$ edges where $n$ is the number of vertices. This density bound is tight, even for outer-apRAC graphs. Moreover, we provide an SPQR-tree based linear-time algorithm which computes an outer-RAC drawing for every given series-parallel graph of maximum degree four. As a complementing result, we present planar graphs of maximum degree four and series-parallel graphs of maximum degree five that are not outer-RAC. Finally, for series-parallel graphs of maximum degree three we show how to compute an outer-apRAC drawing in linear time.