Differentiation Presentation for Sustaining Internet Access in a Disaster-Resilient Homogeneous Wireless Infrastructure

A wireless multihop infrastructure (WMI) employs homogeneous and easily deployable wireless routers to facilitate disaster-resilient Internet access in smart cities, emergency situations, and the Internet of Things. On the other hand, however, a WMI is subject to energy constraints, carries unbalanced traffic, and has weaknesses in terms of maintenance, such as the lack of human management. Therefore, efficiently sharing network tasks and energy consumption in a WMI are essential to network sustainability. In this paper, we consider the problem of explicit differentiation presentation for improving network sustainability, which involves two aspects. One is the problem of quantifying the differentiation of network activities and energy consumption. The other is the problem of utilizing the differentiation factor of each node for routing operations so as to regulate network packet flows for sustaining Internet access in a WMI. We examine the differentiation of network activities and energy consumption in WMIs by considering network activities, including not only packet transmission and reception but also packet overhearing, and other types of energy consumption. Based on the quantification of energy differentiation at each base station (BS), we design a novel router metric that enables an efficient sharing of network activities among BSs. The theoretical analyses of energy differentiation were validated based on the packet-level simulation. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed router metric based on energy differentiation outperforms various other competitive metrics of multihop wireless networks to improve network sustainability for different network models.