Minimum-energy broadcast routing in wireless multi-hop networks

Energy conservation is a critical issue in wireless multi-hop networks since the nodes are powered by batteries only. One major metric for energy conservation is to route a communication session along the routes which requires the lowest total energy consumption. In this paper, based on the concepts of virtual relay, we present a constraint formulation for the minimum-energy broadcast routing problem in terms of mixed integer linear programming (MIP). Moreover the model extends its analytical capability into more general scenarios in asymmetric networks, where few studies have addressed the broadcast routing problem before. The experiment results show that in a typical multi-hop network with node less than 50, optimal solution can be always solved in a timely manner, and save up to 30% power consumption compared to the most efficient heuristic algorithm BIP known so far.