Tropical algebraic geometry is the geometry of the tropical semiring (R, min, +). Its objects are polyhedral cell complexes which behave like complex algebraic varieties. We give an introduction to this theory, with an emphasis on plane curves and linear spaces. New results include a complete description of the families of quadrics through four points in the tropical projective plane and a counterexample to the incidence version of Pappus’ Theorem.

When a sensor network is deployed to detect objects penetrating a protected region, it is not necessary to have every point in the deployment region covered by a sensor. It is enough if the penetrating objects are detected at some point in their trajectory. If a sensor network guarantees that every penetrating object will be detected by at least £ distinct sensors before it crosses the barrier of wireless sensors, we say the network provides £-barrier coverage. In this paper, we develop theoretical foundations for £-barrier coverage. We propose efficient algorithms using which one can quickly determine, after deploying the sensors, whether the deployment region is £-barrier covered. Next, we establish the optimal deployment pattern to achieve £-barrier coverage when deploying sensors deterministically. Finally, we consider barrier coverage with high probability when sensors are deployed randomly. The major challenge, when dealing with probabilistic barrier coverage, is to derive critical conditions using which one can compute the minimum number of sensors needed to ensure barrier coverage with high probability. Deriving critical conditions for £-barrier coverage is, however, still an open problem. We derive critical conditions for a weaker notion of barrier coverage, called weak £-barrier coverage.

We consider a game theoretic knapsack problem that has application to auctions for selling advertisements on Internet search engines. Consider n agents each wishing to place an object in the knapsack. Each agent has a private valuation for having their object in the knapsack and each object has a publicly known size. For this setting, we consider the design of auctions in which agents have an incentive to truthfully reveal their private valuations. Following the framework of Goldberg et al. [10], we look to design an auction that obtains a constant fraction of the profit obtainable by a natural optimal pricing algorithm that knows the agents ’ valuations and object sizes. We give an auction that obtains a constant factor approximation in the non-trivial special case where the knapsack has unlimited capacity. We then reduce the limited capacity version of the problem to the unlimited capacity version via an approximately efficient auction (i.e., one that maximizes the social welfare). This reduction follows from generalizable principles. 1

An outer bound on the rate region of noise-free information networks is given. This outer bound combines properties of entropy with a strong information inequality derived from the structure of the network. This blend of information theoretic and graph theoretic arguments generates many interesting results. For example, the capacity of directed cycles is characterized. Also, a gap between the sparsity of an undirected graph and its capacity is shown. Extending this result, it is shown that multicommodity flow solutions achieve the capacity in an infinite class of undirected graphs, thereby making progress on a conjecture of Li and Li. This result is in sharp contrast to the situation with directed graphs, where a family of graphs are presented in which the gap between the capacity and the rate achievable using multicommodity flows is linear in the size of the graph.

Global barrier coverage that requires much fewer sensors than full coverage, is known to be an appropriate model of coverage for movement detection applications such as intrusion detection. However, it has been proved that given a sensor deployment, sensors can not locally determine whether the deployment provides global barrier coverage, making it impossible to develop localized algorithms, thus limiting its use in practice. In this paper, we introduce the concept of local barrier coverage to address this limitation. Motivated by the observation that movements are likely to follow a shorter path in crossing a belt region, local barrier coverage guarantees the detection of all movements whose trajectory is confined to a slice of the belt region of deployment. We prove that it is possible for individual sensors to locally determine the existence of local barrier coverage, even when the region of deployment is arbitrarily curved. Although local barrier coverage does not always guarantee global barrier coverage, we show that for thin belt regions, local barrier coverage almost always provides global barrier coverage. To demonstrate that local barrier coverage can be used to design localized algorithms, we develop a novel sleep-wakeup algorithm for maximizing the network lifetime, called Localized Barrier Coverage Protocol (LBCP). We show that LBCP provides close to optimal enhancement in network lifetime, while providing global barrier coverage most of the time. It outperforms an existing algorithm called Randomized Independent Sleeping (RIS) by up to 6 times.

We give the first algorithmic study of a class of “covering tour” problems related to the geometric Traveling Salesman Problem: Find a polygonal tour for a cutter so that it sweeps out a specified region (“pocket”), in order to minimize a cost that depends mainly on the number of turns. These problems arise naturally in manufacturing applications of computational geometry to automatic tool path generation and automatic inspection systems, as well as arc routing (“postman”) problems with turn penalties. We prove the NP-completeness of minimum-turn milling and give efficient approximation algorithms for several natural versions of the problem, including a polynomialtime approximation scheme based on a novel adaptation of the m-guillotine method.

Constructing sensor barriers to detect intruders crossing a randomly-deployed sensor network is an important problem. Early results have shown how to construct sensor barriers to detect intruders moving along restricted crossing paths in rectangular areas. We present a complete solution to this problem for sensors that are distributed according to a Poisson point process. In particular, we present an efficient distributed algorithm to construct sensor barriers on long strip areas of irregular shape without any constraint on crossing paths. Our approach is as follows: We first show that in a rectangular area of width w and length ℓ with w = Ω(log ℓ), if the sensor density reaches a certain value, then there exist, with high probability, multiple disjoint sensor barriers across the entire length of the area such that intruders cannot cross the area undetected. On the other hand, if w = o(log ℓ), then with high probability there is a crossing path not covered by any sensor regardless of the sensor density. We then devise, based on this result, an efficient distributed algorithm to construct multiple disjoint barriers in a large sensor network to cover a long boundary area of an irregular shape. Our algorithm approximates the area by dividing it into horizontal rectangular segments interleaved by vertical thin strips. Each segment and vertical strip independently computes the barriers in its own area. Constructing “horizontal ” barriers in each segment connected by“vertical ” barriers in neighboring vertical strips, we achieve continuous barrier coverage for the whole region. Our approach significantly reduces delay, communication overhead, and computation costs compared to centralized approaches. Finally, we implement our algorithm and carry out a number of experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of constructing barrier coverage.

Abstract — Two bounds on network coding rates are reviewed that generalize edge-cut bounds on routing rates. The simpler bound is a bidirected cut-set bound which generalizes and improves upon a flow cut-set bound that is standard in networking. It follows that routing is rate-optimal if routing achieves the standard flow cut-set bound. The second bound improves on the cut-set bound, and it involves progressively removing edges from a network graph and checking whether certain strengthened dseparation conditions are satisfied. I.

This book was typeset with TEX using L ATEX and many further formatting packages. The pictures were prepared using pstricks, xfig, gnuplot and gmt. All numerals in this text are recycled. Für meine Eltern Preface Avoid reality at all costs — fortune(6) As the inclined reader will find out soon enough, this thesis is not about deeply involved mathematics as a mean in itself, but about how to apply mathematics to solve real-world problems. We will show how to shape, forge, and yield our tool of choice to rapidly answer questions of concern to people outside the world of mathematics. But there is more to it. Our tool of choice is software. This is not unusual, since it has become standard practice in science to use software as part of experiments and sometimes even for proofs. But in order to call an experiment scientific it must be reproducible. Is this the case?

Abstract. We study some basic algorithmic problems concerning the intersection of tropical hypersurfaces in general dimension: deciding whether this intersection is nonempty, whether it is a tropical variety, and whether it is connected, as well as counting the number of connected components. We characterize the borderline between tractable and hard computations by proving N P-hardness and #P-hardness results under various strong restrictions of the input data, as well as providing polynomial time algorithms for various other restrictions. 1.