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Counting Plane Graphs: Cross-Graph Charging Schemes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2013

MICHA SHARIR  and
ADAM SHEFFER
MICHA SHARIR
Affiliation:
School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, NY 10012, USA (e-mail: michas@tau.ac.il)
ADAM SHEFFER
Affiliation:
School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel (e-mail: sheffera@tau.ac.il)
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Abstract

We study cross-graph charging schemes for graphs drawn in the plane. These are charging schemes where charge is moved across vertices of different graphs. Such methods have recently been used to obtain various properties of triangulations that are embedded in a fixed set of points in the plane. We generalize this method to obtain results for various other types of graphs that are embedded in the plane. Specifically, we obtain a new bound of O*(187.53N) (where the O*(⋅) notation hides polynomial factors) for the maximum number of crossing-free straight-edge graphs that can be embedded in any specific set of N points in the plane (improving upon the previous best upper bound 207.85N in Hoffmann, Schulz, Sharir, Sheffer, Tóth and Welzl [14]). We also derive upper bounds for numbers of several other types of plane graphs (such as connected and bi-connected plane graphs), and obtain various bounds on the expected vertex-degrees in graphs that are uniformly chosen from the set of all crossing-free straight-edge graphs that can be embedded in a specific point set.

We then apply the cross-graph charging-scheme method to graphs that allow certain types of crossings. Specifically, we consider graphs with no set of k pairwise crossing edges (more commonly known as k-quasi-planar graphs). For k=3 and k=4, we prove that, for any set S of N points in the plane, the number of graphs that have a straight-edge k-quasi-planar embedding over S is only exponential in N.

Keywords

Primary 05C35Secondary 05C10
Type
Paper
Information
Combinatorics, Probability and Computing , Volume 22 , Issue 6 , November 2013 , pp. 935 - 954
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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