Energy-balanced cross layer traffic and coding optimality in battery-powered wireless mesh networks

How to prolong the lifetime of multi-hop-multi-path wireless mesh networks powered by finite battery resource is a critical research challenge. In this paper, we strive for energy-balancing to maximize the network lifetime, while improving multimedia service quality via exploring both hop and path diversities. Different from traditional research, which sacrifices throughput for efficient energy utilization in the networks, we proposed a new approach jointly considering 5 factors in a cross layer fashion: the wireless channel condition, the physical layer channel coding redundancy, the application layer traffic rate, the path level energy-balancing of the network, and the Quality of Service (QoS) of multimedia. In the proposed approach, we develop an optimal scheme to allocate path-level multimedia traffic and link-level channel coding redundancy jointly, which minimizes the routers’ battery energy difference while satisfying a lower bound of quality requirement. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed approach can significantly improve the energy-balancing of the multi-hop-multi-path wireless mesh networks by performing the traffic and channel coding control.