An energy-balanced coding redundancy scheduling approach to support quality of service in battery-powered multi-hop wireless networks

Lifetime is a crucial issue for Multi-hop wireless network powered by size-limited batteries. There have been few algorithms proposed to solve such network lifetime challenge. Furthermore, the application of flexible channel coding redundancy scheduling to improve energy-balancing and energy-efficiency has seldom been reported in literature. In this paper, we propose a new approach to achieve energy-balancing of Multi-hop wireless networks while meeting the requirement of Quality of Service (QoS) by optimizing channel coding rates. In the proposed approach, we develop a scheme to select the optimal channel coding rate on each hop to approach a lower bound of quality requirement while achieving the best effort energy-balancing. Given a certain channel situation, a higher channel coding rate is assigned to reduce the error rate with a higher energy cost; or a lower channel coding rate is assigned to improve energy efficiency and energy-balancing at the cost of reduced QoS. The simulation results have shown that the proposed approach can significantly improve energy-balancing and prolong network lifetime of Multi-hop wireless networks within the QoS requirements.