Query range problem in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks with multiple users extracting data directly from nearby sensors have many potential applications. An important problem in such a network is how to allocate the multi-hop query range for each user such that a certain global optimality is achieved. We introduce this problem and show it is NP-complete in its generic form. Distributed heuristic is proposed and evaluated with simulations. Interesting behaviors of the network when optimized with different global objectives are observed from the simulation results.