Algorithmica (2018) 80:3158–3176 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-017-0373-6 Algorithms for Communication Scheduling in Data Gathering Network with Data Compression Wenchang Luo 1,2 · Yao Xu 2 · Boyuan Gu 2 · Weitian Tong 3 · Randy Goebel 2 · Guohui Lin 2 Received: 8 April 2016 / Accepted: 7 September 2017 / Published online: 12 September 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017 Abstract We consider a communication scheduling problem that arises within wire- less 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 con- sidered. 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 B Guohui Lin guohui@ualberta.ca Wenchang Luo wenchang@ualberta.ca Yao Xu xu2@ualberta.ca Boyuan Gu bgu1@ualberta.ca Weitian Tong wtong@georgiasouthern.edu Randy Goebel rgoebel@ualberta.ca 1 Faculty of Science, Ningbo University, Ningbo 315211, Zhejiang, China 2 Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E8, Canada 3 Department of Computer Sciences, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA 30460, USA 123