Interference Minimization in Asymmetric Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper studies how to assign transmission ranges in asymmetric sensor networks to minimize maximum receiver interference while ensuring strong connectivity, revealing computational complexity and structural properties for optimal solutions.

Contribution

It proves NP-completeness for interference minimization in 2D and develops an exact quasi-polynomial algorithm for 1D cases, extending previous results.

Findings

NP-completeness in 2D for interference ≤ 5

Structural properties of optimal solutions in 1D

Quasi-polynomial time algorithm for 1D case

Abstract

A fundamental problem in wireless sensor networks is to connect a given set of sensors while minimizing the \emph{receiver interference}. This is modeled as follows: each sensor node corresponds to a point in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and each \emph{transmission range} corresponds to a ball. The receiver interference of a sensor node is defined as the number of transmission ranges it lies in. Our goal is to choose transmission radii that minimize the maximum interference while maintaining a strongly connected asymmetric communication graph. For the two-dimensional case, we show that it is NP-complete to decide whether one can achieve a receiver interference of at most $5$. In the one-dimensional case, we prove that there are optimal solutions with nontrivial structural properties. These properties can be exploited to obtain an exact algorithm that runs in quasi-polynomial time. This generalizes a result by Tan et al. to the asymmetric case.