Asymptotic Study of Subcritical Graph Classes

We present a unified general method for the asymptotic study of graphs from the so-called “subcritical” graph classes, which include the classes of cacti graphs, outerplanar graphs, and series-parallel graphs. This general method works both in the labelled and unlabelled framework. The main results concern the asymptotic enumeration and the limit laws of properties of random graphs chosen from subcritical classes. We show that the number gn/n! (resp. gn) of labelled (resp. unlabelled) graphs on n vertices from a subcritical graph class G = ∪nGn satisfies asymptotically the universal behaviour gn = c n −5/2 γ (1 + o(1)) for computable constants c, γ, e.g. γ ≈ 9.38527 for unlabelled series-parallel graphs, and that the number of vertices of degree k (k fixed) in a graph chosen uniformly at random from Gn, converges (after rescaling) to a normal law as n→∞.