A Survey on Packing Colorings

Abstract If S = (a1, a2, . . .) is a non-decreasing sequence of positive integers, then an S-packing coloring of a graph G is a partition of V (G) into sets X1, X2, . . . such that for each pair of distinct vertices in the set Xi, the distance between them is larger than ai. If there exists an integer k such that V (G) = X1 ∪ ∪ Xk, then the partition is called an S-packing k-coloring. The S-packing chromatic number of G is the smallest k such that G admits an S-packing k-coloring. If ai = i for every i, then the terminology reduces to packing colorings and packing chromatic number. Since the introduction of these generalizations of the chromatic number in 2008 more than fifty papers followed. Here we survey the state of the art on the packing coloring, and its generalization, the S-packing coloring. We also list several conjectures and open problems.