On energy-balanced resource scheduling policy optimality for QoS assurance in multi-hop wireless multimedia networks: Wireless Multi-hop Energy Balancing

Energy balancing is an essential issue for scenarios of multi-hop wireless networks powered by batteries, for example, in disaster relief applications. In this paper, we propose a new transmission scheduling policy to extend the lifetime of a linear chain topology based multi-hop wireless multimedia network by maximizing the energy-balancing between routers. Two error-control techniques, Forward Error Correction and Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ), are adaptively deployed by the proposed strategy to achieve the maximal energy-balancing with the minimal quality requirement constraint. By considering the energy-balancing and the lower bound of multimedia quality constraint, the optimal channel coding redundancy and the optimal ARQ data retransmission strategy are applied to multimedia packets when those packets pass through each router in data transmission. To reduce the computing complexity, we simplify the solution by grouping multimedia packets with similar quality contribution, separating the global quality requirement into multiple local quality requirements, and allocating the optimal local quality requirement to each multimedia packet group. The simulation results show the proposed approach can significantly improve energy-balancing and lifetime of the multi-hop wireless multimedia network in both linear chain topology and more complex topologies.