Flow Aggregation for Energy-Aware Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks Respecting QoS Provisions

Emerging communication technologies are now leading developers to design IT systems taking into count their energy-related considerations. Much research performed in the area of ad-hoc wireless networks tends to distribute the flows over all nodes of the network, which increases the amount of energy consumed by each node and reduces longevity of the network. To overcome these problems, this paper seeks to aggregate a set of flows within a number of nodes that is as low as possible in order to be capable of routing those flows. This proposal allows to maximize the number of network nodes that may be turned off. The proposed solution was formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem using a set of energy and quality of service (QoS) constraints. This formulation minimizes the total energy consumed by the nodes to construct a topology network that is capable of meeting QoS requirement for a set flows inserted into the network. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed model, a performance-based comparison was conducted with another routing model. The simulation results show that the proposed model offers better performance in terms of global energy consumption and network load. Keywords—ad-hoc wireless networks, flow’s aggregation, global energy consumption, ILP, QoS provisions.