Throughput-Lifetime Trade-Offs in Multihop Wireless Networks under an SINR-Based Interference Model

High throughput and lifetime are both crucial design objectives for a number of multihop wireless network applications. As these two objectives are often in conflict with each other, it naturally becomes important to identify the trade-offs between them. Several works in the literature have focused on improving one or the other, but investigating the trade-off between throughput and lifetime has received relatively less attention. We study this trade-off between the network throughput and lifetime for the case of fixed wireless networks, where link transmissions are coordinated to be conflict-free. We employ a realistic interference model based on the Signal-to-Interference-and-Noise Ratio (SINR), which is usually considered statistically sufficient to infer success or failure of wireless transmissions. Our analytical and numerical results provide several insights into the interplay between throughput, lifetime, and transmit power. Specifically, we find that with a fixed throughput requirement, lifetime is not monotonic with power-neither very low power nor very high power result in the best lifetime. We also find that, for a fixed transmit power, relaxing the throughput requirement may result in a more than proportional improvement in the lifetime for small enough relaxation factors. Taken together, our insights call for a careful balancing of objectives when designing a wireless network for high throughput and lifetime.