THE NUMBER OF EDGES IN k-QUASI-PLANAR GRAPHS

A graph drawn in the plane is called k-quasi-planar if it does not contain k pair-wise crossing edges. It has been conjectured for a long time that for every fixed k, the maximum number of edges of a k-quasi-planar graph with n vertices is O(n). The best known upper bound is n(log n)(O(log k)). In the present paper, we improve this bound to (n log n)2(alpha(n)ck) in the special case where the graph is drawn in such a way that every pair of edges meet at most once. Here alpha(n) denotes the (extremely slowly growing) inverse of the Ackermann function. We also make further progress on the conjecture for k-quasi-planar graphs in which every edge is drawn as an x-monotone curve. Extending some ideas of Valtr, we prove that the maximum number of edges of such graphs is at most 2(ck6) n log n.