Enhancing transport capacity with optimum energy allocation for geographic transmissions

In multi-hop packet radio networks with low mobility, forwarding strategies based on the location of the radios are considered to be quite robust and scalable since they consume less network resources for the exchange and storage of network state information than conventional routing. When such geographical forwarding strategies are used over fading channels, the presence of multiple potential forwarding agents provides multi-user diversity. However, the number of radios that should keep their receivers active during a transmission may need to be limited to conserve the energy of mobile devices. Since receivers at different distances from the transmitter have different probabilities of recovering a message, we have previously proposed node activation based on link distance (NA-BOLD) schemes to increase the transmission distance and/or transport capacity, with a constraint on the energy used in reception (which depends on the number of nodes that activate to receive a transmission). In this work, we consider a total energy constraint, i.e., a constraint on the sum of the energies used in transmission and reception. We optimize the allocation of energy between transmission and reception when nodes activate using NA-BOLD approaches.