Energy efficiency of QoS routing in multi-hop wireless networks

The trend of adopting more and more wireless mobile computers and smartphones has changed our way of living. Those devices heavily rely on the underlying wireless network systems to provide adequate communication support. As streaming audio and video becomes norm, the requests for stringent maximum end-to-end latency and minimum bandwidth make the networking process more difficult. Quality of Service (QoS) routing is designed to fulfill such requirements. In this paper, we study the performance of QoS routing in multi-hop wireless networks from the perspective of energy efficiency. Since there are sophisticated relationships between wireless radio propagation and energy consumption, various QoS routing strategies produce significantly different results in terms of energy efficiency. Through extensive simulation experiments, the shortest path routing, minimum energy routing, minimum hop routing, and maximum throughput routing are compared.