Low-Complexity and Distributed Energy Minimization in Multihop Wireless Networks

Abstract

In this work, we study the problem of minimizing the total power consumption in a multihop wireless network subject to a given offered load. It is well-known that the total power consumption of multihop wireless networks can be substantially reduced by jointly optimizing power control, link scheduling, and routing. However, the known optimal cross-layer solution to this problem is centralized and with high computational complexity. In this paper, we develop a low-complexity and distributed algorithm that is provably power-efficient. In particular, under the node-exclusive interference model and with suitable assumptions on the power-rate function, we can show that the total power consumption of our algorithm is at most (2+¿) times as large as the power consumption of the optimal (but centralized and complex) algorithm, where ¿ is an arbitrarily small positive constant. Our algorithm is not only the first such distributed solution with provable performance bound, but its power-efficiency ratio is also tighter than that of another suboptimal centralized algorithm in the literature.