Power optimal routing in wireless networks

Reducing power consumption and increasing battery life of nodes in an ad-hoc network requires an integrated power control and routing strategy. Power optimal routing selects the multi-hop links that require the minimum total power cost for data transmission under a constraint on the link quality. This paper studies optimal power routing under the constraint of a fixed end-to-end probability of error and compares the power optimal routes obtained with this criterion with those from the more commonly used fixed per hop error rate constraint. The comparison is carried out by looking at the properties of the power optimal graph, formed by the union of all the power optimal routes. The paper also provides algorithms to determine the power optimal routes.