Axes-parallel unit disk graph recognition is NP-hard
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Unit disk graphs are the intersection graphs of unit diameter disks in the Euclidean plane. Recognizing unit disk graph is an important geometric problem, and has many application areas. In general, this problem is shown to be ∃R-complete. However, in some applications, the objects that correspond to unit disks have predefined (geometrical) structures to be placed on. Hence, many scientists attacked this problem by restricting the domain for the centers of the disks. One example to such applications is wireless sensor networks, where each disk corresponds to a wireless sensor node, and a pair of intersecting disks correspond to a pair of sensors being able to communicate with each other. It is usually assumed that the nodes have identical sensing ranges, and thus unit disk graph model is used to model problems concerning wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we also attack the unit disk recognition problem on a restricted domain, by assuming a scenario where the wireless sensor nodes are deployed on the corridors of a building, forming collinear groups. Based on this scenario, we impose a geometric constraint such that the unit disks must be centered onto given straight lines. We show that deciding whether there exists an embedding of unit disk graphs is NP-hard, even if the given straight lines are parallel to either x-axis or y-axis. Moreover, we remark that if the straight lines are not given, then the problem becomes ∃R-complete.
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