Green communication in energy renewable wireless mesh networks: Routing, rate control, and power allocation

The increasing demand for wireless services has led to a severe energy consumption problem with the rising of greenhouse gas emission. While the renewable energy can somehow alleviate this problem, the routing, flow rate, and power still have to be well investigated with the objective of minimizing energy consumption in multi-hop energy renewable wireless mesh networks (ER-WMNs). This paper formulates the problem of network-wide energy consumption minimization under the network throughput constraint as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem by jointly optimizing routing, rate control, and power allocation. Moreover, the min-max fairness model is applied to address the fairness issue because the uneven routing problem may incur the sharp reduction of network performance in multi-hop ER-WMNs. Due to the high computational complexity of the formulated mathematical programming problem, an energy-aware multi-path routing algorithm (EARA) is also proposed to deal with the joint control of routing, flow rate, and power allocation in practical multi-hop WMNs. To search the optimal routing, it applies a weighted Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, where the weight is defined as a function of the power consumption and residual energy of a node. Extensive simulation results are presented to show the performance of the proposed schemes and the effects of energy replenishment rate and network throughput on the network lifetime.