A tight upper bound on the (2,1)-total labeling number of outerplanar graphs

Abstract

A $(2,1)$-total labeling of a graph $G$ is an assignment $f$ from the vertex set $V(G)$ and the edge set $E(G)$ to the set $\{0,1,...,k\}$ of nonnegative integers such that $|f(x)-f(y)|\ge 2$ if $x$ is a vertex and $y$ is an edge incident to $x$, and $|f(x)-f(y)|\ge 1$ if $x$ and $y$ are a pair of adjacent vertices or a pair of adjacent edges, for all $x$ and $y$ in $V(G)\cup E(G)$. The $(2,1)$-total labeling number $λ^T_2(G)$ of a graph $G$ is defined as the minimum $k$ among all possible assignments. In [D. Chen and W. Wang. (2,1)-Total labelling of outerplanar graphs. Discr. Appl. Math. 155, 2585--2593 (2007)], Chen and Wang conjectured that all outerplanar graphs $G$ satisfy $λ^T_2(G) \leq Δ(G)+2$, where $Δ(G)$ is the maximum degree of $G$, while they also showed that it is true for $G$ with $Δ(G)\geq 5$. In this paper, we solve their conjecture completely, by proving that $λ^T_2(G) \leq Δ(G)+2$ even in the case of $Δ(G)\leq 4 $.