The product structure of squaregraphs

Abstract

A squaregraph is a plane graph in which each internal face is a 4‐cycle and each internal vertex has degree at least 4. This paper proves that every squaregraph is isomorphic to a subgraph of the semistrong product of an outerplanar graph and a path. We generalise this result for infinite squaregraphs, and show that this is best possible in the sense that “outerplanar graph” cannot be replaced by “forest”.