Bounding the paired-domination number of a tree in terms of its annihilation number

Abstract

A paired-dominating set of a graph G = (V; E) with no isolated vertex is a dominating set of vertices whose induced subgraph has a perfect matching. The paired-domination number of G, denoted by γpr(G), is the minimum cardinality of a paired-dominating set of G. The annihilation number a(G) is the largest integer k such that the sum of the first k terms of the non-decreasing degree sequence of G is at most the number of edges in G. In this paper, we prove that for any tree T of order n ≥ 2, γpr(T) ≤ 4a(T)+2/3 and we characterize the trees achieving this bound.