Semipaired domination in maximal outerplanar graphs (Q2331595)

Let $G$ be a graph with vertex set $V(G)$. A set $D \subseteq V(G)$ is a dominating set of $G$ if each vertex not in $D$ is adjacent to a vertex in $D$ of $G$. If $G$ has no isolated vertex, then a dominating set $S$ of $G$ is called a semi-paired dominating set of $G$ if every vertex in $S$ is paired with exactly one other vertex in $S$ that is within distance two from it. The semi-paired domination number, $\gamma_{\mathrm{pr2}}(G)$, of $G$ is the minimum among the cardinalities of all semi-paired dominating sets of $G$. An outerplanar graph is a graph that has a planar drawing for which all vertices belong to the outer face of the drawing, and a maximal outerplanar graph is an outerplanar graph such that any addition of an edge results in a graph that is not outerplanar. The authors study semi-paired domination in maximal outerplanar graphs. Let $G$ be a maximal outer-planar graph of order $n$ with $n_2$ vertices of degree $2$. They obtain the following upper bounds of $\gamma_{\mathrm{pr2}}(G)$, and construct a family of graphs achieving the equalities: \par (a) if $n \ge 5$, then $\gamma_{\mathrm{pr2}}(G) \le \frac{2n}{5}$; \par (b) if $n\ge 3$, then $\gamma_{\mathrm{pr2}}(G) \le \frac{1}{3}(n+n_2)$.