Joint Rate Control and Power Control for Lifetime Maximization in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we investigate the lifetime maximization problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The objective of lifetime maximization is to save energy for each sensor node, and to provide good service for users. On the other hand, the application performance depends strongly on the amount of data gathered from each source node in the network. Higher data rates cause greater sensing and communication costs resulting in a reduction of the overall network lifetime. Thus there is an inherent trade-off in maximizing the network lifetime and guaranteeing the application performance. In this paper, we take both application performance and lifetime maximization into account, use a cross layer optimization framework and propose a distributed joint rate control and power control algorithm. Our numerical results show that our scheme can maximize the network lifetime and guarantee the application performance.