An approximate bandwidth allocation algorithm for tradeoff between fairness and throughput in WSN

In this paper, we investigate the problem of bandwidth allocation in wireless sensor network (WSN) under signal to noise plus interference ratio interference model, which aims at finding a tradeoff between fairness and network throughput. Specifically, we propose an approximate algorithm to solve this problem since it has been proved to be NP-hard. Different from similar algorithms proposed in previous issues, we maximize two utility functions, which are the newly defined bandwidth utility function for fairness and network throughput, by jointly considering sensor nodes association and resource allocation in WSN. In addition, we formulate a new utility function with respect to bandwidth allocation, with the method of weighted sum of two objectives as one objective function, which will find a tradeoff between fairness and throughput. Consequently, the problem is decomposed into two sub-problems and solved in two stages, which are cluster formation stage and scheduling stage. In the first stage, we let sensor nodes join to cluster head nodes, which can determine the association of sensor nodes; in the second stage, the total utility function is maximized by allocating time slots for tradeoff between fairness and throughput. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve better performance than compared algorithms.