Edge-partitioning 3-edge-connected graphs into paths (Q2673486)

For two given graphs \(G\) and \(H\), we say that \(G\) is \(H\)-decomposable if there exists a partition \(\{E_i\}_{i\in [k]}\) of \(E(G)\) such that each \(E_i\) forms an isomorphic copy of \(H\). We then call \(\{E_i\}_{i\in [k]}\) an \(H\)-decomposition of \(G\). Many researchers presented some conditions for the existence of \(H\)-decompositions of graphs, such as tree-decomposition, cycle-decomposition, path-decomposition, clique- decomposition, and triangle-decomposition. In this paper, the authors show that for every \(\ell\), there exists \(d_{\ell}\) such that every 3-edge-connected graph with minimum degree \(d_{\ell}\) can be edge-partitioned into paths of length \(\ell\) (provided that its number of edges is divisible by \(\ell\)), which improves a result asserting that 24-edge-connectivity and high minimum degree provides such a partition. Furthermore, the authors show that 3-edge-connectivity in the main result is the best possible, that is, 3-edge-connectivity in the main result cannot be replaced by 2-edge connectivity.