Energy-efficient flow control in wireless mesh networks

Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important for wireless mesh networks (WMNs). There is an inherent tradeoff between energy consumption and throughput, the latter being correlated to the rate at which the users transmit their data. Also, with the explosive growth in demands for high data rate, progressive energy is expended. Motivated by these issues, we present flow control scheme in order to get proper rate allocation. We consider a WMN that is participated in by a number of clients. Each one of them is communicating with its corresponding gateway by using a defined route. The associated utility function with each client equals its transmission rate. We formulate the flow control problem as one of maximizing the sum of the clients´ utilities subject to the requisite restriction on the network lifetime and given activity time for clients. Results of our simulations demonstrate direct relationship between energy budget of devices and throughput. Also, during the experiments, throughput-lifetime and throughput-fairness tradeoffs are identified. Our numerical results provide insight into interplay between the given activity time for clients and throughput.