A Battery Aware Scheme for Energy Efficient Coverage and Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks recently emerge as a flexible, low- cost and multi-functional networking platform with wired infrastructure connected to the Internet. A critical issue in mesh networks is to maintain long time network coverage. Recent study reveals that batteries tend to discharge more power than needed, and reimburse the over-discharged power later if they have sufficiently long recovery time. To take advantage of the battery recovery property, in this paper we propose a cross-layer client driven battery aware (CDBA) scheme to efficiently schedule mesh network coverage. The key idea of CDBA coverage algorithm is to let neighboring mesh routers collaboratively adjust their transceiver radii driven by mesh clients. In this way routers are able to recover their over-discharged battery power dynamically. This algorithm is a distributed algorithm with O(n) time complexity where n is the maximum number of neighbors of a router in the network. To further jointly improve system performance among layers, we design the CDBA MAC algorithm to provide a seamless and fast service for handoff among mesh routers. We conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed CDBA scheme. The results show that network lifetime and data throughput can be improved by up to 27.27% and 30.54% in mesh networks, respectively.