Polynomial-time approximation schemes for piercing and covering with applications in wireless networks

Let be a set of disks of arbitrary radii in the plane, and let be a set of points. We study the following three problems: (i) Assuming contains the set of center points of disks in , find a minimum-cardinality subset of (if exists), such that each disk in is pierced by at least h points of , where h is a given constant. We call this problem minimum h-piercing. (ii) Assuming is such that for each there exists a point in whose distance from D's center is at most αr(D), where r(D) is D's radius and 0α<1 is a given constant, find a minimum-cardinality subset of , such that each disk in is pierced by at least one point of . We call this problem minimum discrete piercing with cores. (iii) Assuming is the set of center points of disks in , and that each covers at most l points of , where l is a constant, find a minimum-cardinality subset of , such that each point of is covered by at least one disk of . We call this problem minimum center covering. For each of these problems we present a constant-factor approximation algorithm (trivial for problem (iii)), followed by a polynomial-time approximation scheme. The polynomial-time approximation schemes are based on an adapted and extended version of Chan's T.M. Chan, Polynomial-time approximation schemes for packing and piercing fat objects, J. Algorithms 46 (2003) 178–189] separator theorem. Our PTAS for problem (ii) enables one, in practical cases, to obtain a (1+ε)-approximation for minimum discrete piercing (i.e., for arbitrary ).