Joint power minimization in wireless relay channels

Energy-constrained multihop wireless links are considered, where the total power consumption is minimized under given requirements on the end-to-end bit error rate (BER). As multihop transmissions are known to be able to save transmission energy in a wireless environment, we study the optimal power scheduling schemes over intermediate hops when the source-relays-destination link can be modeled as cascaded binary symmetric channels. The problem is formulated with an end-to-end BER constraint, and the resulting power consumption is compared with that of the individual link requirement strategy where each hop assigns power under a per-link BER constraint. Results show that the proposed joint power scheduling strategy can achieve a maximum power reduction factor of M in an M-hop route.