In this paper we consider a remote monitoring scenario where the monitoring center is geographically located far away from the region of the deployed sensor network, and the sensing data by the sensors is transmitted to the monitoring center through a third party telecommunication service, thus a cost associated with this service will be incurred, which is related to the amount of data successfully received by the monitoring center within a specified period. For this scenario, we first formulate a novel optimization problem, namely, the throughput guaranteed service cost minimization problem with an objective to minimize the service cost while the specified network throughput requirement is guaranteed. We show that the problem is NP-complete. We then propose a heuristic for it. The key ingredients of the heuristic include identifying gateways and finding an energy-efficient forest of routing trees rooted at the gateways. Finally, we conduct experiments by simulation to evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristic. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed algorithm outperforms other two mentioned algorithms in terms of both service cost and the network lifetime.
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