Spectral efficiency guaranteed sustainable routing for energy renewable wireless mesh networks

A fundamental concern for energy renewable wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is properly routing exotic traffic across the network according to the energy adequacy at different mesh APs, such that the probability that mesh APs deplete their energy and go out of service is minimized, or equivalently, the network sustainability is maximized. However, existing sustainable routing schemes suffer significantly from low spectral efficiency (SE) performance, either because the selected path goes through links with poor quality or the route stretches too long so as to bypass nodes with low residual energy. This will inevitably lead to low end-to-end attainable rate (i.e., SE), and consequently underutilization of the scarce bandwidth resource. To cope with the above issue, we take SE into consideration and formulate the sustainable routing problem with stringent SE guarantee as an integer nonlinear programming problem. In addition, an optimal shortest path based sustainable routing (SPSR) algorithm is proposed to solve the problem with polynomial-time complexity. Extensive simulation results verify that our proposed SPSR algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art solutions in terms of both SE and network lifetime.