Abstract
Building on previous work [Bonifaci et al., Minimizing flow time in the wireless gathering problem, STACS 2008] we study data gathering in a wireless network through multi-hop communication with the objective to minimize the average flow time of a data packet. We show that for any 
the problem is NP-hard to approximate within a factor better than 
, where m is the number of data packets. On the other hand, we give an online polynomial time algorithm that we analyze using resource augmentation. We show that the algorithm has average flow time bounded by that of an optimal solution when the clock speed of the algorithm is increased by a factor of five. As a byproduct of the analysis we obtain a 5-approximation algorithm for the problem of minimizing the average completion time of data packets.
Research supported by EU FET-project under contract no. FP6-021235-2 ARRIVAL and by the EU COST-action 293 GRAAL.
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Bonifaci, V., Korteweg, P., Marchetti-Spaccamela, A., Stougie, L. (2008). Minimizing Average Flow Time in Sensor Data Gathering. In: Fekete, S.P. (eds) Algorithmic Aspects of Wireless Sensor Networks. ALGOSENSORS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5389. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92862-1_3
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