Branch‐and‐price for energy optimization in multi‐hop wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely deployed to support transmissions of the huge data emitted by heterogeneous connected devices. The quality of service (QoS) and energy requirements in WSNs are dramatically increasing and becoming challenging issues. Integrating network coding, in the data transmission process, leads to reduced energy consumption and improved QoS. In this work, we study the problem of energy efficiency in multi-hop WSNs, namely wireless unsplittable multi-commodity flow with network coding (wUMCFC). We propose mixed-integer programming formulations of the wUMCFC problem, and we implement an open source solver wUMCFC based on the branch-and-price algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first study of the wUMCFC problem by mathematical programming tools. We perform a computational study on realistic instances with an analysis of the performance of the proposed algorithm. The computational results show the efficiency of the network coding and provide important information for strategic decisions on routing policies and network management https://github.com/ lidingxu/wUMCFC.

Optimization in Wireless Networks

“…While many WSN technologies and deployments rely on single-hop communications, extensions for multi-hop communication in IoT-related technologies, both cellular and non-cellular, are attracting research and industry [50,27]. Multi-hop communication in WSNs, in par-ticular, would increase network capacity and coverage without requiring new infrastructure This section focuses on the energy efficiency in multihop WSNs, namely the wireless unsplittable multi-commodity flow with network coding (wUMCFC) problem studied in [42].…”

“…The wUMCFC problem, considered in this article, generalizes the UMCF problem with introducing additional coding and interference constraints. wUMCFC is proved to be N P−hard in [42] by a reduction to the single-source unsplittable flow problem [19,34,44].…”

“…This section is dedicated to present the path-based formulation developped in [42]. This formulation leads to better modelling of the unsplittable routing and network coding constraints than the compact edge-based formulations.…”

“…The path-based formulation wUMCFC-P (2) has an exponential number of path variables, but the numerical experiments in [42] show that it can be solved efficiently by the column generation approach.…”

“…To analyse the performance of the proposed column generation approach, a computational study on realistic instances is performed in [42]. The obtained computational results shows that the proposed branch&price algorithm outperforms the CPLEX solver both in terms of running time and duality gap.…”