Joint Rate-Routing Control for Fair and Efficient Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, fair and efficient rate allocation is an essential mechanism to avoid congestion collapse and system degradation. While most prior work in this context has focused on a static tree, we consider the joint optimization of routing and rate allocation in this work. We formulate LP problems to obtain max-min fairness and sum-rate efficiency. We show the tradeoff between fairness and efficiency in this setting, and develop distributed algorithms based on Lagrange duality to achieve these objectives.