AN APPROXIMATION SCHEME FOR A GEOMETRICAL NP-HARD PROBLEM

In some wireless sensor networks, the sensor nodes are required to be located sparsely at designated positions over a wide area, introducing the problem of adding minimum number of relay nodes to interconnect the sensor nodes. The problem finds its a bstract form in literature: the Minimum number of Steiner Points. Since it is known to be NP-hard, this paper proposes an approximation scheme to estimate the minimum number of relay nodes through the properties of the abstract form. Note that by reducing the numb er of nodes in a sensor network, the amount of data exchange over the net will be far decreased.