Energy balance in wireless networks using connection segmentation and range control

In a wireless network some nodes incur a disproportionate share of the packet forwarding burden than the others: nodes lying toward the center tend to lie on more paths and therefore expend more energy in forwarding packets than other nodes, resulting in a shorter lifetime. While routes can be selected to alleviate this problem, we explore an entirely different and complementary approach by exploiting a wireless node's capability to adjust its transmission power. Each connection is partitioned into two segments, each of which uses the regular network or direct transmission between the source and the destination. The relative durations of each segment are optimized to balance energy consumption across the network. This paper formulates an energy balance optimization problem in terms of the segmentation time, and an algorithm is presented that reduces variance in energy consumption at the cost of a modest increase in average energy consumption. The paper also presents a distributed algorithm for this optimization problem.