Computational complexity of relay placement in sensor networks

Abstract

We study the computational complexity of relay placement in energy-constrained wireless sensor networks. The goal is to optimise balanced data gathering, where the utility function is a weighted sum of the minimum and average amounts of data collected from each sensor node. We define a number of classes of simplified relay placement problems, including a planar problem with a simple cost model for radio communication. We prove that all of these problem classes are NP-hard, and that, in some cases even finding approximate solutions is NP-hard. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.