Ordered Coloring Grids And Related Graphs

We investigate a coloring problem, called ordered coloring, in grids and some other families of grid-like graphs. Ordered coloring (also known as vertex ranking) is related to conflict-free coloring and other traditional coloring problems. Such coloring problems can model (among others) efficient frequency assignments in cellular networks. Our main technical results improve upper and lower bounds for the ordered chromatic number of grids and related graphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to calculate exactly the ordered chromatic number of these graph families.