On Isolating Points Using Disks

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of choosing disks (that we can think of as corresponding to wireless sensors) so that given a set of input points in the plane, there exists no path between any pair of these points that is not intercepted by some disk. We try to achieve this separation using a minimum number of a given set of unit disks. We show that a constant factor approximation to this problem can be found in polynomial time using a greedy algorithm. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to study this optimization problem.