Collective Cooperation Among Base Stations to Sustain Wireless Infrastructure
Rui Teng · IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing · 2020
Flexible network infrastructure is highly desired in emergencies and for the Internet of Things (IoT). Wireless multi-hop infrastructures (WMIs) are flexible network structures that employ wireless-connected base stations (BSs). Since wireless BSs may be powered by battery or green energy for ease of networking, it is important to sustain the WMI in the energy-constraint circumstances. There have been extensive studies for sensor networks and ad hoc networks to improve energy efficiency and network lifetime. However, a WMI has a different functional structure and activities compared to these conventional wireless networks. This paper addresses the challenging issue of longtime regulation of network-wide activities according to the available energy resources to sustain the WMI in the energy-constraint period. To cope with the complexity of network-wide activities, we classify network activities into three types: the data delivery, network maintenance and route switching. Moreover, to enable explicit cooperation among BSs, the network-wide functional structure is transformed into a set of independent routes. Then, we propose a scheme of the longtime regulation of network-wide activities according to the correlation of network-wide activities and energy resources. The proposed scheme explicitly specifies an optimal combination of differentiated serving terms for BS-routes. The evaluation results show that the specified serving terms employed in the proposed scheme highly improve the network sustainability. Furthermore, the results also illustrate that the larger number of independent BS-routes lead to the good sustainability. From the application perspective, the quantitatively specified serving terms for the set of routes facilitate the easy setting up of operation in emergencies and IoT networks.