Node-centric energy balancing for wireless networks

Selfishness and altruism are two distinctive node behaviors in wireless networks. Users of network nodes, e.g. mobile phones, would like their individual devices to be operational for as long as possible. On the other hand, users and operators of wireless networks may wish for an overall long network lifetime via collaborative node operations. In contrast to the most of the work done till now, in this paper, we consider a node-centric scenario, where a node can balance its energy consumption according to its needs to prolong the node lifetime. More specifically, the energy balancing problem is defined as an inventory control problem, where the node may choose to be selfish or unselfish with various degrees having in mind a range of parameters, such as its battery state and the existence and rate of energy harvesting. Each node can use the proposed solution to allocate the available energy between internal (node itself) and external (collaborative) tasks subject to dependencies among application and communication layers and the node operating system. We also discuss a number of other possible extensions of the method to include interactions among different nodes in the network. To illustrate one such an extension, a case study with a large number of nodes among two separate but co-located wireless mesh networks is presented. By applying the inventory balancing algorithm, considerable increase in the network lifetime is shown for both networks.