Rainbow triangles in arc-colored digraphs

Let D be an arc-colored digraph. The arc number a(D) of D is defined as the number of arcs of D. The color number c(D) of D is defined as the number of colors assigned to the arcs of D. A rainbow triangle in D is a directed triangle in which every pair of arcs has distinct colors. Let f(D) be the smallest integer such that if c(D)≥f(D), then D contains a rainbow triangle. In this paper we obtain f(K↔_n) and f(T_n), where K↔_n is a complete digraph of order n and T_n is a strongly connected tournament of order n. Moreover we characterize the arc-colored complete digraph K↔_n with c(K↔_n)=f(K↔_n)−1 and containing no rainbow triangles. We also prove that an arc-colored digraph D on n vertices contains a rainbow triangle when a(D)+c(D)≥a(K↔_n)+f(K↔_n), which is a directed extension of the undirected case.