A Simple and Efficient Way to Save Energy in Multihop Wireless Networks with Flow Aggregation

Today, whether in industry, research, or civil applications, there are many incentives to reduce the energy footprint of automated systems. In multihop wireless networks, the main objective in that regard is usually to maximize the lifetime of the network by distributing the load over all nodes. In this paper, we improve a solution that aggregates flows to optimize the number of nodes that can be turned off. We introduce interference awareness in a routing metric designed to aggregate flows to avoid overloading the network and to preserve the quality of service required by the flows. This way, it becomes possible to integrate this metric into classical shortest path routing algorithms that do not consider interference. We also show that flow aggregation and overall energy consumption are equivalent problems.