Energy efficient management framework for multihop TDMA-based wireless networks

Green networking has recently been proposed to reduce energy cost as well as carbon footprint of computer networks. However, the application of green networking to multihop wireless networks has seldom been reported in the literature. This paper presents an energy-efficient framework for joint routing and link scheduling in multihop TDMA-based wireless networks. Our objective is to find an optimal tradeoff between the achieved network throughput and energy consumption. To do so, we first propose an Optimal approach, called Optimal Green Routing and Link Scheduling (O-GRLS), by formulating the problem as an integer linear program (ILP). As this problem is NP-Hard, we then propose a simple yet efficient heuristic algorithm based on Ant Colony, called AC-GRLS. Through extensive simulations, we show that both approaches can achieve significant gains in terms of energy consumption, flow acceptance ratio and achieved throughput, compared to the Shortest Path (SP) routing, and the Minimum link Residual Capacity (MRC) based routing. In particular, we show that the same performance as SP or MRC in terms of average network throughput can be attained with up to 20% energy saving. On the other hand, with the same energy cost, our approaches enhance the flow acceptance ratio by up to 35% in average. This leads to a throughput increase of approximately 50% and 52% compared to SP and MRC routing, respectively.