812 research outputs found
Hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems
The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a central generic problem in
computer science and artificial intelligence: it provides a common framework
for many theoretical problems as well as for many real-life applications. Soft
constraint problems are a generalisation of the CSP which allow the user to
model optimisation problems. Considerable effort has been made in identifying
properties which ensure tractability in such problems. In this work, we
initiate the study of hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems; that is,
properties which guarantee tractability of the given soft constraint problem,
but which do not depend only on the underlying structure of the instance (such
as being tree-structured) or only on the types of soft constraints in the
instance (such as submodularity). We present several novel hybrid classes of
soft constraint problems, which include a machine scheduling problem,
constraint problems of arbitrary arities with no overlapping nogoods, and the
SoftAllDiff constraint with arbitrary unary soft constraints. An important tool
in our investigation will be the notion of forbidden substructures.Comment: A full version of a CP'10 paper, 26 page
Achievable and Crystallized Rate Regions of the Interference Channel with Interference as Noise
The interference channel achievable rate region is presented when the
interference is treated as noise. The formulation starts with the 2-user
channel, and then extends the results to the n-user case. The rate region is
found to be the convex hull of the union of n power control rate regions, where
each power control rate region is upperbounded by a (n-1)-dimensional
hyper-surface characterized by having one of the transmitters transmitting at
full power. The convex hull operation lends itself to a time-sharing operation
depending on the convexity behavior of those hyper-surfaces. In order to know
when to use time-sharing rather than power control, the paper studies the
hyper-surfaces convexity behavior in details for the 2-user channel with
specific results pertaining to the symmetric channel. It is observed that most
of the achievable rate region can be covered by using simple On/Off binary
power control in conjunction with time-sharing. The binary power control
creates several corner points in the n-dimensional space. The crystallized rate
region, named after its resulting crystal shape, is hence presented as the
time-sharing convex hull imposed onto those corner points; thereby offering a
viable new perspective of looking at the achievable rate region of the
interference channel.Comment: 28 pages, 12 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions of Wireless
Communicatio
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