Parameterized Algorithms for Power-Efficient Connected Symmetric Wireless Sensor Networks

We study an NP-hard problem motivated by energy-efficiently maintaining the connectivity of a symmetric wireless sensor communication network. Given an edge-weighted n-vertex graph, find a connected spanning subgraph of minimum cost, where the cost is determined by letting each vertex pay the most expensive edge incident to it in the subgraph. We provide an algorithm that works in polynomial time if one can find a set of obligatory edges that yield a spanning subgraph with O(logn) connected components. We also provide a linear-time algorithm that reduces any input graph that consists of a tree together with g additional edges to an equivalent graph with O(g) vertices. Based on this, we obtain a polynomial-time algorithm for g ∈ O(logn). On the negative side, we show that o(logn)approximating the difference d between the optimal solution cost and a natural lower bound is NP-hard and that there are presumably no exact algorithms running in 2 time or in f(d) ·n time for any computable function f .