An Energy-Efficient Backpressure Routing and Scheduling Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Much previous work had demonstrated the remarkable performance of backpressure based routing and scheduling algorithms in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the absence of consideration on energy use efficiency in the design of existing backpressure based algorithms makes them difficult to be deployed in resource-limited WSNs. In this paper, we study how to improve the energy use efficiency of backpressure based algorithm. For this purpose, we propose an energy efficient backpressure routing and scheduling algorithm (EBP) for WSNs. In EBP, a new link weight calculation method is designed, based on which nodal energy status is considered when making decisions on backpressure based transmission scheduling. In EBP, packets are encouraged to be forwarded to nodes with more residual energy while the throughput-optimality of backpressure based algorithm is still preserved. Simulation results show that EBP can obtain significant performance improvements in terms of energy use efficiency, network throughput, and packet delivery ratio as compared with existing work.