Complexity of conflict-free colorings of graphs

We consider conflict-free colorings of graph neighborhoods: Each vertex of the graph must be assigned a color so that for each vertex v there is at least one color appearing exactly once in the neighborhood of v. The goal is to minimize the number of used colors. We consider both the case of closed neighborhoods, when the neighborhood of a node includes the node itself, and the case of open neighborhoods when a node does not belong to its neighborhood. In this paper, we study complexity aspects of the problem. We show that the problem of conflict-free coloring of closed neighborhoods is NP-complete. Moreover, we give non-approximability results for the conflict-free coloring of open neighborhoods. From a positive point of view, both problems become tractable if parameterized by the vertex cover number or the neighborhood diversity number of the graph. We present simple algorithms which improve on existing results.