A load-balanced minimum energy routing algorithm for Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks

Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks (WSNs) have received considerable academia research attention at present. The energy-constraint sensor nodes in WSNs operate on limited batteries, so it is a very important issue to use energy efficiently and reduce power consumption. To maximize the network lifetime, it is essential to prolong each individual node’s lifetime through minimizing the transmission energy consumption, so that many minimum energy routing schemes for traditional mobile ad hoc network have been developed for this reason. This paper presents a novel minimum energy routing algorithm named Load-Balanced Minimum Energy Routing (LBMER) for WSNs considering both sensor nodes’ energy consumption status and the sensor nodes’ hierarchical congestion levels, which uses mixture of energy balance and traffic balance to solve the problem of “hot spots” of WSNs and avoid the situation of “hot spots” sensor nodes using their energy at much higher rate and die much faster than the other nodes. The path router established by LBMER will not be very congested and the traffic will be distributed evenly in the WSNs. Simulation results verified that the LBMER performance is better than that of Min-Hop routing and the existing minimum energy routing scheme MTPR (Total Transmission Power Routing).

NeuroPrim:An attention-based model for solving NP-hard spanning tree problems

Spanning tree problems with specialized constraints can be difficult to solve in real-world scenarios,often requiring intricate algorithmic design and exponential time.Recently,there has been growing interest in end-to-end deep neural networks for solving routing problems.However,such methods typically produce sequences of vertices,which make it difficult to apply them to general combinatorial optimization problems where the solution set consists of edges,as in various spanning tree problems.In this paper,we propose NeuroPrim,a novel framework for solving various spanning tree problems by defining a Markov decision process for general combinatorial optimization problems on graphs.Our approach reduces the action and state space using Prim's algorithm and trains the resulting model using REINFORCE.We apply our framework to three difficult problems on the Euclidean space:the degree-constrained minimum spanning tree problem,the minimum routing cost spanning tree problem and the Steiner tree problem in graphs.Experimental results on literature instances demonstrate that our model outperforms strong heuristics and achieves small optimality gaps of up to 250 vertices.Additionally,we find that our model has strong generalization ability with no significant degradation observed on problem instances as large as 1,000.Our results suggest that our framework can be effective for solving a wide range of combinatorial optimization problems beyond spanning tree problems.