Energy-Efficient Dual-Hop Internet of Things Communications Network With Delay-Outage Constraints

This article considers a dual-hop Internet of Things communications network where sensor nodes transmit data to a gateway either directly or via other nodes using dual-hop communications. Each node employs separate transmission buffers to store its own sensing data and data received from other nodes. End-to-end delay quality-of-service constraints in terms of the maximum acceptable delay-outage probabilities are imposed. We investigate energy-efficient adaptive resource allocation problems (i.e., joint link scheduling, rate, and power allocation) to support minimum data rates of the nodes. A novel approach is proposed exploiting asymptotic delay analysis to first determine the achieved delay exponents of the queue length tail distributions to satisfy the delay-outage constraints. Next, the relation between the delay exponents and resource allocation variables are derived. Last, the solutions to the resulting constrained optimization problems are obtained using the Lagrangian approach and convex optimization. Illustrative examples demonstrate the effects of the rate requirements and delay constraint stringency on the power consumption and routing configuration.