Fair Capacity Sharing Among Multiple Sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks

The data transmission capacity of wireless sensor networks is known to be limited by both the hardware and the sink-based communication paradigm. In a multi-sink application scenario, simultaneous queries may generate traffic exceeding the transmission capacity of certain sensor nodes. In this paper, we intend to share the capacity of the sensors among multiple sinks by adjusting their query ranges, so that no sensor gets congested and every sink is able to monitor an area with desired data rate. Specifically, the max-min fairness will be ensured. An analytical model is presented and theoretical results for two-sink case is given. Then a distributed algorithm allowing sinks to approach the optimal query range with local knowledge is developed. Finally, simulation results are shown to illustrate the characteristics of this capacity sharing problem and to validate the effectiveness of our distributed algorithm.