Minimum energy cooperative path routing in all-wireless networks: NP-completeness and heuristic algorithms

We study the routing problem in all-wireless networks based on cooperative transmissions. We model the minimum-energy cooperative path (MECP) problem and prove that this problem is NP-complete. We hence design an approximation algorithm called cooperative shortest path (CSP) algorithm that uses Dijkstra´s algorithm as the basic building block and utilizes cooperative transmissions in the relaxation procedure. Compared with traditional non-cooperative shortest path algorithms, the CSP algorithm can achieve a higher energy saving and better balanced energy consumption among network nodes, especially when the network is in large scale. The nice features lead to a unique, scalable routing scheme that changes the high network density from the curse of congestion to the blessing of cooperative transmissions.