Energy-efficient Routing and Rate Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy-efficient routing is an important problem in wireless sensor networks due to the severe energy constraints of sensor nodes. Although a large amount of routing architectures and protocols for the matter has been proposed, very little work has been done on the distributed routing algorithm that maximizes network utility. To address this issue, in this paper, we formulate network resource allocation as a network utility maximization problem, and then present a distributed routing and rate adaption algorithm by using dual decomposition techniques. The proposed algorithm converges to the global optimal point. Numerical results validate our arguments.