Closing the Gap: Eternal Domination on 3 x n Grids

The domination number for grid graphs has been a long studied problem; the first results appeared over thirty years ago [Jacobson 1984] and the final results appeared in 2013 [Goncalves 2013]. Grid graphs are a natural class of graphs to consider for the eternal dominating set problem as the domination number forms a lower bound for the eternal domination number. The 3 x n grid has been considered in several papers, and the difference between the upper and lower bounds for the eternal domination number in the all-guards move model has been reduced to a linear function of n. In this short paper, we provide an upper bound for the eternal domination number which exceeds the lower bound by at most 3