Minimizing the Maximum Interference is Hard

TL;DR

This paper proves that optimizing transmission ranges to minimize maximum interference in wireless networks, while keeping the network connected, is an NP-complete problem, highlighting its computational difficulty.

Contribution

It establishes the NP-completeness of minimizing maximum interference with connected symmetric communication graphs under a disk model.

Findings

Minimizing maximum interference is NP-complete.

Connected symmetric communication graphs are hard to optimize for interference.

The problem remains computationally difficult under the disk model.

Abstract

We consider the following interference model for wireless sensor and ad hoc networks: the receiver interference of a node is the number of transmission ranges it lies in. We model transmission ranges as disks. For this case we show that choosing transmission radii which minimize the maximum interference while maintaining a connected symmetric communication graph is NP-complete.