Clique partitions of the cocktail party graph

Abstract Let T v denote the complenent of a perfect matching in the complete graph on v vertices, v even, and let cp (T v ) be the minimum number of cliques needed to partition the edge-set of T v . We prove that cp (T v ) ⩾ v for v ⩾ 8 and give a design characterization of the cases where equality holds. We also show that, asymptotically, cp (T v ) ⩽ v log log v .