Novel algorithms for the network lifetime problem in wireless settings

A wireless ad-hoc network is a collection of transceivers positioned in the plane. Each transceiver is equipped with a limited, non-replenishable battery charge. The battery charge is then reduced after each transmission, depending on the transmission distance. One of the major problems in wireless network design is to route network traffic efficiently so as to maximize the network lifetime, i.e., the number of successful transmissions. This problem is known to be NP-Hard for a variety of network operations. In this paper we are interested in two fundamental types of transmissions, broadcast and data gathering. We provide polynomial time approximation algorithms, with guaranteed performance bounds, for the maximum lifetime problem under two communication models, omnidirectional and unidirectional antennas. We also consider an extended variant of the maximum lifetime problem, which simultaneously satisfies additional constraints, such as bounded hop-diameter and degree of the routing tree, and minimizing the total energy used in a single transmission.