On the admission of dependent flows in powerful sensor networks

In this paper we define and study a new problem, referred to as the Dependent Unsplittable Flow Problem (D-UFP). We present and discuss this problem in the context of large-scale powerful (radar/camera) sensor networks, but we believe it has important applications on the admission of large flows in other networks as well. In order to optimize the selection of flows transmitted to the gateway, D-UFP takes into account possible dependencies between flows. We show that D-UFP is more difficult than NP-hard problems for which no good approximation is known. Then, we address two special cases of this problem: the case where all the sensors have a shared channel and the case where the sensors form a mesh and route to the gateway over a spanning tree.