Energy and throughput tradeoff in wireless networks with processing energy considerations

Many wireless network studies pertain to the derivation of throughput bounds and cross-layer optimization for energy conservation. From a practical perspective, often a network must meet the competing objective of attaining high throughput while conserving energy for prolonged operation. The tradeoff between these two important network metrics has not been adequately addressed in the literature. A further deficiency in existing research lies in the suppression of non-distance-dependent processing energy in energy models, which can lead erroneously to routing on paths with large number of hops. We model processing energy explicitly, and show that for a particular implementation of wireless network, the average path power is a monotonically increasing, piecewise linear function of throughput. Furthermore, we quantify a network region size threshold such that in a small region relative to the threshold, direct transmission routing is both energy conserving and throughput achieving. For larger regions, path power optimal routing may not achieve the maximum throughput. Higher throughput may be achieved with suboptimal routing schemes that lead to higher marginal power increase as the throughput increases