Delay constrained minimum energy broadcast in cooperative wireless networks

We formulate the problem of delay constrained energy-efficient broadcast in cooperative multihop wireless networks. We show that this important problem is not only NP-complete, but also o(log(n)) inapproximable. We derive approximation results and an analytical lower-bound for this problem. We break this NP hard problem into three parts: ordering, scheduling and power control. We show that when the ordering is given, the joint scheduling and power-control problem can be solved in polynomial time by a novel algorithm that combines dynamic programming and linear programming to yield the minimum energy broadcast for a given delay constraint. We further show empirically that this algorithm used in conjunction with an ordering derived heuristically using the Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm yields near-optimal performance in typical settings. We use our algorithm to study numerically the trade-off between delay and power-efficiency in cooperative broadcast and compare the performance of our cooperative algorithm with a smart non-cooperative algorithm.