Data delivery by energy-constrained mobile agents

Abstract

We consider mobile agents of limited energy, which have to collaboratively deliver data from specified sources of a network to a central repository. Every move consumes energy that is proportional to the travelled distance. Thus, every agent is limited in the total distance it can travel. We ask whether there is a schedule of agents' movements that accomplishes the delivery. We provide hardness results, as well as exact, approximation, and resource-augmented algorithms for several variants of the problem. Among others, we show that the decision problem is NP-hard already for a single source, and we present a 2-approximation algorithm for the problem of finding the minimum energy that can be assigned to each agent such that the agents can deliver the data. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.