On vertex rankings of graphs and its relatives

Abstract A vertex ranking of a graph is an assignment of ranks (or colors) to the vertices of the graph, in such a way that any simple path connecting two vertices of equal rank, must contain a vertex of a higher rank. In this paper we study a relaxation of this notion, in which the requirement above should only hold for paths of some bounded length l for some fixed l. For instance, already the case l=2 exhibits quite a different behavior than proper coloring. We prove upper and lower bounds on the minimum number of ranks required for several graph families, such as trees, planar graphs, graphs excluding a fixed minor and degenerate graphs.