An energy‐efficient link quality monitoring scheme for wireless networks

Abstract

Link quality is one of the most important factors that affect the performance of wireless networks. In a densely deployed wireless network, continuous link quality monitoring consumes significant amount of energy and bandwidth at each node. In this paper, we propose a sensitivity model and a spatial correlation model that can be used to derive a set of deputy links to monitor, instead of monitoring all of the links in the network. The proposed scheme can improve energy efficiency of the link quality monitoring process. A greedy algorithm is presented to derive the deputy links set based on three different optimization objective functions. Performance of the proposed method is studied extensively and it is shown that the proposed method can save almost 90% energy in typical simulation scenarios than the method of monitoring all links. We also demonstrate that the energy consumption of the greedy deputy set‐based method is upper‐bounded. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.