Joint power control and rate adaptation in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are energy-constrained, as a result, energy allocation and data transmission on sensor nodes are always considered together. However, current approaches ignore the multiple-hop nature of sensor networks, which results in the lack of modeling energy consumption in data relaying process. In this paper, we illustrate the importance of this issue and formulate the data sensing and transmission in WSNs as a network utility maximization (NUM) problem. A price-based distributed algorithm is proposed to solve this NUM problem, and it can stimulate the cooperation of power control and rate adaptation among the nodes along the data relaying path. Considering the time-varying wireless environment in WSNs, the stability of the proposed algorithm is studied by convergence analysis under stochastic perturbations. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm converges to the optimal energy allocation and data transmission.