We consider a communication scheduling problem that arises within wireless sensor networks, where data is accumulated by the sensors and transferred directly to a central base station. One may choose to compress the data collected by a sensor, to decrease the data size for transmission, but the cost of compression must be considered. The goal is to designate a subset of sensors to compress their collected data, and then to determine a data transmission order for all the sensors, such that the total compression cost is minimized subject to a bounded data transmission completion time (a.k.a. makespan). A recent result confirms the NP-hardness for this problem, even in the special case where data compression is free. Here we first design a pseudo-polynomial time exact algorithm, articulated within a dynamic programming scheme. This algorithm also solves a variant with the complementary optimization goal-to minimize the makespan while constraining the total compression cost within a given budget. Our second result consists of a bi-factor -approximation for the problem, where refers to the compression cost and 2 refers to the makespan, and a 2-approximation for the variant. Lastly, we apply a sparsing technique to the dynamic programming exact algorithm, to achieve a dual fully polynomial time approximation scheme for the problem and a usual fully polynomial time approximation scheme for the variant.
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