Equitable tree-$O(d)$-coloring of $d$-degenerate graphs

Abstract: An equitable tree-$k$-coloring of a graph is a vertex coloring on $k$ colors so that every color class incudes a forest and the sizes of any two color classes differ by at most one.This kind of coloring was first introduced in 2013 and can be used to formulate the structure decomposition problem on the communication network with some security considerations. In 2015, Esperet, Lemoine and Maffray showed that every $d$-degenerate graph admits an equitable tree-$k$-coloring for every $k\geq 3^{d-1}$. Motivated by this result, we attempt to lower their exponential bound to a linear bound. Precisely, we prove that every $d$-degenerate graph $G$ admits an equitable tree-$k$-coloring for every $k\geq \alpha d$ provided that $|G|\geq \beta \Delta(G)$, where $(\alpha,\beta)\in {(8,56), (9,26), (10,18), (11,15), (12,13), (13,12), (14,11), (15,10), (17,9), (20,8), (27,7), (52,6)}$.