Using Centrality-Based Power Control for Hot-Spot Mitigation in Wireless Networks

When shortest path routing is employed in large scale multi-hop wireless networks, nodes located near the center of the network have to perform disproportionate amount of relaying for others. To solve the problem, various divergent routing schemes are used which route the data on center-avoiding divergent routing paths. Though they achieve better load balancing, overall relaying is increased significantly due to their longer routing paths. In this paper, we propose power control as a way for balancing relay load and mitigating hot-spots in wireless networks. Using a heuristic based on the concept of centrality, we show that if we increase the power levels of only the nodes which are expected to relay more packets, significant relay load balancing can be achieved even with shortest path routing. Different from divergent routing schemes, such load balancing strategy is applicable to any arbitrary topology. Also, it is shown that centrality based power control results into better throughput capacity in many different topologies.