Dual domination problems in graphs

We introduce a novel domination problem, which we call Dual Domination (DD). We assume that the nodes in a network are partitioned into two categories: Positive nodes (V+) and negative nodes (V−). We study the Maximum Bounded Dual Domination, where, given a bound k, the problem is to find a set D⊆V+, which maximizes the number of nodes dominated in V+, dominating at most k nodes in V−. We show that such problem is hard to approximate to a factor better than (1−1/e). We give a polynomial time algorithm with approximation guaranteed (1−e−1/Δ), where Δ represents the maximum number of neighbors in V+ of any node in V−, and an O(|V|k2) time algorithm to solve the problem on trees. We also study two related problems named Maximum Dual Domination and minimum Negative Dual Domination. For both problems, we show hardness results and provide O(|V|) time algorithms on trees.