Wireless backbone networks represent an attractive alternative to wired networks in situations where cost, speed of deployment, and flexibility in network design are important. In typical configurations, users connect to wireless routers of the backbone network, which then redirect the traffic to one of the existing network gateways. To improve the network performance, wireless backbone routers redirect their traffic to the network gateways so as to maximize amount of traffic that can be supported by the network. In this paper, we prove that this problem is NP-hard as a result of the wireless interference that is created between geographically close transmission links. We consequently design and investigate the performance of interference-aware algorithms suitable for multi-channel environments against more traditional routing approaches. We evaluate their performance in simulated environments based on data taken from existing networks, and show that interference-based heuristics exhibit advantageous performance in non-uniform deployment.

In this paper, we consider several static data structure problems in the deterministic cell probe model. We develop a new technique for proving lower bounds for succinct data structures, where the redundancy in the storage can be small compared to the information-theoretic minimum. In fact, we succeed in matching (up to constant factors) the lower order terms of the existing data structures with the lower order terms provided by our lower bound. Using this technique, we obtain (i) the first lower bound for the problem of searching and retrieval of a substring in text; (ii) a cell probe lower bound for the problem of representing permutation π with queries π(i) and π−-1(i) that matches the lower order term of the existing data structures, and (iii) a lower bound for representing binary matrices that is also matches upper bounds for some set of parameters. The nature of all these problems is that we are to implement two operations that are in a reciprocal relation to each other (search and retrieval, computing forward and inverse element, operations on rows and columns of a matrix). As far as we know, this paper is the first to provide an insight into such problems.

We consider two variants of the well-known "sailor in the fog" puzzle. The first version (the "asteroid surveying" problem) is set in three dimensions and asks for the shortest curve that starts at the origin and intersects all planes at unit distance from the origin. Several possible solutions are suggested in the video, including a curve of length less than 12.08. The second version (the "river shore" problem) asks for the shortest curve in the plane that has unit width. A solution of length 2.2782 is described, which we have proved to be optimal.