Convex Grid Drawings of Four-connected Plane Graphs

A convex grid drawing of a plane graph G is a drawing of G on the plane such that all vertices of G are put on grid points, all edges are drawn as straight-line segments without any edge-intersection, and every face boundary is a convex polygon. In this paper we give a linear-time algorithm for finding a convex grid drawing of every 4-connected plane graph G with four or more vertices on the outer face. The size of the drawing satisfies W + H ≤ n - 1, where n is the number of vertices of G, W is the width and H is the height of the grid drawing. Thus the area W · H is at most ⌈(n - 1)/2⌉ · ⌊(n - 1)/2⌋. Our bounds on the sizes are optimal in a sense that there exist an infinite number of 4-connected plane graphs whose convex drawings need grids such that W + H = n - 1 and W · H = ⌈(n - 1)/2⌉ · ⌊(n - 1)/2⌋.