Joint Optimal Routing and Power Allocation for Spectral Efficiency in Multihop Wireless Networks

Given a multihop wireless network and a source-destination pair of nodes, this paper addresses the problem of jointly selecting a communication route and allocating transmit power levels, so that the end-to-end spectral efficiency of the route exceeds a desired threshold. Spectral-efficient routing has been subject to interest in the recent literature. The transmit power level, however, has been assumed to be known, and route selection was considered in isolation. This paper presents the first rigourously proven optimal, polynomial-time algorithms for two versions of the joint spectral-efficient routing and power allocation problem: sum-power minimization and maximum power minimization. The proposed algorithms rely on the divide-and-conquer principle and the Bellman-Ford algorithm for shortest (or widest) path computation. Our computational results further illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.