Epsilon-Optimal Minimal-Skew Battery Lifetime Routing in Distributed Embedded Systems

Most sensor networks and networked embedded systems operate on batteries. Minimizing the total power consumption in such systems is of paramount importance to increase their operational lifetime. In such systems, the power optimization becomes even more important, due to the small size of the batteries as well as the distributed nature of the power sources. To prolong the lifetime of such systems, the lifetime of each individual sensor or embedded system must be maximized. Therefore, ideally, the power consumption rate must be evenly distributed over all the nodes in the system. This objective cannot be satisfied by employing the traditional routing algorithms which attempts to minimize the total power consumption of the system. In this paper, we propose an -optimal polynomial time multi-hop routing technique that maximizes the lifetime of the system with respect to distributed battery sources. Furthermore, it aims to evenly distribute the power consumption rate which yields in a minimal-skew solution. We theoretically prove that our technique is efficient. Finally, we illustrate the quality of the solutions generated by our technique on a few benchmarks.