Energy, latency and capacity trade-offs in wireless multi-hop networks

This paper concentrates on characterizing energy, latency and capacity trade-offs in multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networks. Therefore, a multiobjective framework is proposed to derive the Pareto-optimal set of solutions with respect to these three criteria. The work presented in this paper assumes a linear network where transmission powers and relay positions are optimization variables. We study the asymptotic state where the distance between source and destination is very high such that the number of hops tends to infinite. Two types of traffic are considered in the following. First, low rate traffic is analyzed by characterizing the multiobjective performance of a single packet transmission using an interference free multi-hop relaying strategy. Second, a continuous flow of packets from a unique source is considered. In the first case, we show an important theorem which states that all Pareto optimal solutions with respect to delay and energy metrics provide the same target SNR at the receiver side. In the second case, our analytical results highlight how the energy/delay Pareto front moves when considering a capacity constraint and the optimal re-use factor is derived.