Throughput-Lifetime tradeoffs in multihop wireless networks under a realistic interference model

Throughput and lifetime are both crucial design objectives for multihop wireless networks. In general, it is not sufficient to optimize either of them separately. As these two objectives are often conflicting with each other, we can only hope to identify the tradeoffs between them. This entails a harder problem than dealing with either solely. In this paper, we propose a general framework for investigating the tradeoff between throughput and lifetime. We employ a utility-based tradeoff objective that allows us to identify tradeoffs that are of physical interest. We consider a scheduled network where link transmissions can be coordinated to be conflict-free. We use a realistic interference model owing to which we gain a deep understanding of the network configurations that achieve the optimal tradeoffs. Our analytical and numerical results provide instructive insights into the interplay between the configurations and the throughput/lifetime.