Polynomial algorithm for sharp upper bound of rainbow connection number of maximal outerplanar graphs

For a finite simple edge-colored connected graph G (the coloring may not be proper), a rainbow path in G is a path without two edges colored the same; G is rainbow connected if for any two vertices of G, there is a rainbow path connecting them. Rainbow connection number, rc(G), of G is the minimum number of colors needed to color its edges such that G is rainbow connected. Chakraborty et al. (2011) [5] proved that computing rc(G) is NP-hard and deciding if rc(G) = 2 is NP-complete. When edges of G are colored with fixed number k of colors, Kratochvil [6] proposed a question: what is the complexity of deciding whether G is rainbow connected? is this an FFT problem? In this paper, we prove that any maximal outerplanar graph is k rainbow connected for suitably large k and can be given a rainbow coloring in polynomial time. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.