Finding a dominating set on bipartite graphs

Finding a dominating set of minimum cardinality is an NP-hard graph problem, even when the graph is bipartite. In this paper we are interested in solving the problem on graphs having a large independent set. Given a graph G with an independent set of size z, we show that the problem can be solved in time O∗(2n−z), where n is the number of vertices of G. As a consequence, our algorithm is able to solve the dominating set problem on bipartite graphs in time O∗(2n/2). Another implication is an algorithm for general graphs whose running time is O(n1.7088).