Graceful labelings of the generalized Petersen graphs

Abstract

A graceful labeling of a graph $G=(V,E)$ with $m$ edges is aninjection $f: V(G) rightarrow {0,1,ldots,m}$ such that the resulting edge labelsobtained by $|f(u)-f(v)|$ on every edge $uv$ are pairwise distinct. For natural numbers $n$ and $k$, where $n > 2k$, a generalized Petersengraph $P(n, k)$ is the graph whose vertex set is ${u_1, u_2, cdots, u_n} cup {v_1, v_2, cdots, v_n}$ and its edge set is ${u_iu_{i+1}, u_iv_i, v_iv_{i+k} : 1 leq i leq n }$, where subscript arithmetic is done modulo $n$. We propose a backtracking algorithm with a specific static variable ordering and dynamic value ordering to find graceful labelings for generalized Petersen graphs.Experimental results show that the presented approach strongly outperforms the standard backtracking algorithm. The proposed algorithm is able to find graceful labelings for all generalized Petersen graphs $P(n, k)$ with $n le 75$ within only several seconds.