The packing chromatic number of hypercubes

Abstract

The packing chromatic number χρ (G) of a graph G is the smallest integer k needed to proper color the vertices of G in such a way that the distance in G between any two vertices having color i be at leasti+1. Goddard et al. (2008) found an upper bound for the packing chromatic number of hypercubes Qn. Moreover, they compute χρ (Qn) for n ≤ 5 leaving as an open problem the remaining cases. In this paper, we obtain a better upper bound for χρ (Qn) and we improve the lower bounds for χρ (Qn) for 6 ≤ n ≤ 11. In particular we compute the exact value of χρ (Qn) for 6 ≤ n ≤ 8.