Complexity of approximation of 3-edge-coloring of graphs

The problem to find a 4-edge-coloring of a 3-regular graph is solvable in polynomial time but an analogous problem for 3-edge-coloring is NP-hard. To make the gap more precise, we study complexity of approximation algorithms for invariants measuring how far is a 3-regular graph from having a 3-edge-coloring. We show that it is an NP-hard problem to approximate such invariants with an error O(n1−ε), where n denotes the order of the graph and 0<ε<1 is a constant.