WLC02-6: Progressive Accumulative Routing in Wireless Networks

This paper considers a sensor network where relay nodes cooperate in order to minimize the total energy consumption for the unicast transmission of a message from a single source to a single destination. We assume Destination Energy Accumulation, i.e., the destination can accumulate the energy of multiple copies of the message, each of which is too weak to be reliably decoded by itself, while the relay nodes use a decode-and-forward approach. We propose the Progressive Accumulative Routing (PAR) algorithm, which performs relay discovery, relay ordering and power allocation in a distributed manner so that each relay node only needs information about its neighboring nodes. Simulations verify that the algorithm considerably reduces the total energy consumption, and can be implemented efficiently. Furthermore, it performs close to the optimal DEA route with high probability.