Towards Donovan's conjecture for abelian defect groups

We define a new invariant for a $p$-block, the strong Frobenius number, which we use to address the problem of reducing Donovan's conjecture to normal subgroups of index p. As an application we use the strong Frobenius number to complete the proof of Donovan's conjecture for 2-blocks with abelian defect groups of rank at most 4 and for 2-blocks with abelian defect groups of order at most 64.