On Coloring Unit Disk Graphs

In this paper the coloring problem for unit disk (UD) graphs is considered. UD graphs are the intersection graphs of equal-sized disks in the plane. Colorings of UD graphs arise in the study of channel assignment problems in broadcast networks. Improving on a result of Clark et al. [2] it is shown that the coloring problem for UD graphs remains NP-complete for any fixed number of colors k≥ 3 . Furthermore, a new 3-approximation algorithm for the problem is presented which is based on network flow and matching techniques. Received February 12, 1996; revised October 9, 1996.