Optimal Point Movement for Covering Circular Regions

Danny Z. Chen, Xuehou Tan, Haitao Wang, Gangshan Wu

Abstract: Given n points in a circular region C in the plane, we study the problem of moving these points to the boundary of C to form a regular n-gon such that the maximum of the Euclidean distances traveled by the points is minimized. These problems find applications in mobile sensor barrier coverage of wireless sensor networks. The problem further has two versions: the decision version and optimization version. In this paper, we present an O(nlog2 n) time algorithm for the decision version and an O(nlog3 n) time algorithm for the optimization version. The previously best algorithms for these two problem versions take O(n 3.5) time and O(n 3.5logn) time, respectively. A by-product of our techniques is an algorithm for dynamically maintaining the maximum matching of a circular convex bipartite graph; our algorithm performs each vertex insertion or deletion on the graph in O(log2 n) time. This result may be interesting in its own right.