Lower bounds for the number of edge-crossings over the spine in a topological book embedding of a graph Original Research Article

In a topological book embedding of a graph, the graph is drawn in a topological book by placing the vertices along the spine of the book and drawing the edges in the pages; edges are allowed to cross the spine. Earlier results show that every graph having n vertices and m edges can be embedded into a 3-page book with at most O(m log n) edge-crossings over the spine. This paper presents lower bounds on the number of edge-crossings over the spine for a variety of graphs. These bounds show that the upper bound O(m log n) is essentially best possible.