On the complexity of rainbow coloring problems

In this paper we present a range of new results on the computational complexity of computing the four major variants of the rainbow connection number. In particular, we prove that the Strong Rainbow Vertex Coloring problem is NP-complete even on graphs of diameter 3, and also when the number of colors is restricted to 2. On the other hand, we show that if the number of colors is fixed then all of the considered problems can be solved in linear time on graphs of bounded treewidth. Moreover, we provide a linear-time algorithm which decides whether it is possible to obtain a rainbow coloring by saving a fixed number of colors from a trivial upper bound. Finally, we give a linear-time algorithm for computing the exact rainbow connection numbers for three variants of the problem on graphs of bounded vertex cover number.