Achieving maximum flow in interference-aware wireless sensor networks with smart antennas

Directional antenna offers various benefits for wireless sensor networks, such as increased spatial reuse ratio and reduced energy consumption. In this paper, we formulate the maximum flow problem as an optimization problem in interference-limited wireless sensor networks with switched beam directional antennas. The optimization problem is solvable in the presence of an omniscient controller, but it is NP-hard. Therefore, we seek a distributed algorithm to achieve the maximum flow through jointly routing and scheduling. The maximum flow between given source destination pair is determined forwardly hop by hop and is verified by the proposed feasible condition at downstream nodes. This method works for both single-beam antenna and multi-beam antenna with some variation in the feasibility condition.