Communication scheduling in data gathering networks with limited memory

In this paper scheduling communications in data gathering networks is analyzed. We study collecting information by a set of sensors, each of which stores the data in its memory buffer and then passes them to a base station. The network lifetime ends as soon as the first node is out of memory. We use a divisible load model to propose a communication scheduling algorithm that maximizes the system lifetime, and hence, the total amount of gathered information. The influence of the sensor communication rates on the obtained schedules is exposed in a series of computational experiments.