Packing colorings of subcubic outerplanar graphs

Given a graph $G$ and a nondecreasing sequence $S=(s_1,\ldots,s_k)$ of positive integers, the mapping $c:V(G)\longrightarrow \{1,\ldots,k\}$ is called an $S$-packing coloring of $G$ if for any two distinct vertices $x$ and $y$ in $c^{-1}(i)$, the distance between $x$ and $y$ is greater than $s_i$. The smallest integer $k$ such that there exists a $(1,2,\ldots,k)$-packing coloring of a graph $G$ is called the packing chromatic number of $G$, denoted $χ_ρ(G)$. The question of boundedness of the packing chromatic number in the class of subcubic (planar) graphs was investigated in several earlier papers; recently it was established that the invariant is unbounded in the class of all subcubic graphs. In this paper, we prove that the packing chromatic number of any 2-connected bipartite subcubic outerplanar graph is bounded by $7$. Furthermore, we prove that every subcubic triangle-free outerplanar graph has a $(1,2,2,2)$-packing coloring, and that there exists a subcubic outerplanar graph with a triangle that does not admit a $(1,2,2,2)$-packing coloring. In addition, there exists a subcubic triangle-free outerplanar graph that does not admit a $(1,2,2,3)$-packing coloring. A similar dichotomy is shown for bipartite outerplanar graphs: every such graph admits an $S$-packing coloring for $S=(1,3,\ldots,3)$, where $3$ appears $Δ$ times ($Δ$ being the maximum degree of vertices), and this property does not hold if one of the integers $3$ is replaced by $4$ in the sequence $S$.

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