Maximizing the Utility Without the Knowledge of the Link Capacity in a Wireless Sensor Network
Bingxin Niu, Keqiu Li, Kai Lin and Weilian Xue
Efficiency and fairness are the most important objective for the network design. Network utility maximum (NUM) has been stated to solve this problem. This optimal problem can maximize the sum of all the nodes’ utility with the transmission rate of each node as the variable. The transmission rate is constrained by the link’s capacity. It considers the tradeoff between the efficiency and fairness of the whole network. But when we consider this problem in the wireless sensor networks, according to the capacity of each link is varying with the time, it is impossible to correctly estimate it on-the-fly. So we propose a method to solve the NUM problem that does not require knowledge of each link’s capacity in the wireless sensor networks. Our mechanism doesn’t have the problem of wasting memory and can estimate the congestion condition more correctly when dealing with multi-hop nodes. Simulation results express that our method can maximize the utility of the sensor network.
Keywords: Wireless sensor network and utility function and congestion control and optimization