An Approximate Power Control Algorithm for a Multi-Cast Wireless Virtual Network Embedding

Internet of Things (IoT) applications witness an exceptional evolution of traffic demands, while existing protocols, as seen in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), struggle to cope with these demands. Traditional protocols rely on finding a routing path between sensors generating data and sinks acting as gateway or databases. Meanwhile, the network will suffer from high collisions in case of high data rates. In this context, in-network processing solutions are used to leverage the wireless nodes’ computations, by distributing processing tasks on the nodes along the routing path. Although in-network processing solutions are very popular in wired networks (e.g., data centers and wide area networks), there are many challenges to adopt these solutions in wireless networks, due to the interference problem. In this paper, we solve the problem of routing and task distribution jointly using a greedy Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) algorithm, and consider power control as well. Through simulations, we compare the proposed algorithm to optimal solutions and show that it achieves good results in terms of delay. Moreover, we discuss its sub-optimality by driving tight lower bounds and loose upper bounds. We also compare our solution with another wireless VNE solution to show the trade-off between delay and symbol error rate.