Optimal topology control for balanced energy consumption in wireless networks

Hosts in wireless networks are usually powered by batteries, thus the lifetime of a network depends on the battery life of each individual host. One major solution to improve energy-efficiency is to minimize the total energy consumption. However, battery energy is a local resource, to save energy at each host and balance the energy consumption among all the hosts in the network appear to be more practical. In this paper, we prove that minimum weight incremental arborescence (MWIA) is the optimal solution for minimizing the maximum transmission power among a set of wireless nodes. We propose an algorithm that utilizes MWIA to construct a connected topology, called MWIA-based Topology Control(MWIA-TC) algorithm. We further apply MWIA-TC to the accumulated energy consumption. The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that MWIA-TC outperforms a well-known algorithm, Minimum Incremental Power (MIP), in both energy saving and network lifetime extension.