Joint base station placement and fault-tolerant routing in wireless sensor networks

Fault tolerance techniques have been widely used in wireless sensor networks. Base station placement to maximize the network lifetime has also been well studied. However, limited research has been done on the joint base station placement and fault-tolerant routing problem. To fill this void, we study this problem and present a fully polynomial time approximation scheme in this paper. Our scheme can compute a (1 - ε)-approximation with a running time bounded by a polynomial in 1/ε and the input size of the instance. Despite our solution is presented for the model where the base station can be placed anywhere, however it can be easily extended to cases where forbidden areas are present or candidate locations for the base station are given. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first theoretical result on this problem.