Exact and Approximation Algorithms for Minimizing Energy in Wireless Sensor Data Gathering Network with Data Compression

Abstract This article studies the problem of minimizing the total energy consumed in a heterogeneous wireless sensor data gathering network with data compression. In a wireless sensor data gathering network, a set of sensors is used to collect data and all the data are required to be transmitted to a single base station. Whether the base station is working in data receiving or idle mode, it consumes energy. To reduce the data transmission time, each sensor has the option to compress its collected data to decrease the original size before sending the data to the base station. However, compressing data takes some time delaying the data transmission starting time and also consuming energy. The task is to choose which sensors should compress their data and determine the data transmission order between the sensors and the base station with the goal of minimizing the total energy consumed. We prove that the studied problem is NP-hard, and propose a pseudo-polynomial dynamic programming exact algorithm. Furthermore, we present an approximation algorithm with the performance ratio that depends on the given energy consuming parameters for each unit time in different energy consuming activities.