Rate control for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks: Characterization, algorithms and performance

This paper addresses the rate control and resource allocation problem for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, which consist of diverse node types or modalities such as sensors and actuators, and different tasks or applications. The performance of these applications, either elastic traffic nature (e.g., typical data collection) or inelastic traffic nature (e.g., real-time monitoring and controlling), is modeled as a utility function of the sensor source rate. The traditional rate control approach, which requires the utility function to be strictly concave, is no longer applicable because of the involvement of inelastic traffic. Therefore, we develop a utility framework of rate control for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks with single- and multiple-path routing, and propose utility fair rate control algorithms, that are able to allocate the resources (wireless channel capacity and sensor node energy) efficiently and guarantee the application performance in a utility proportional or max–min fair manner. Furthermore, the optimization and convergence of the algorithm is investigated rigorously as well.