Achievable Rate and Power Consumption in Source/Relay Wireless Networks

We compute the optimal communication rate achieved by the nodes of a wireless network with arbitrary topology. The network nodes operate in half-duplex mode and generate information that has to be delivered to a gateway node, possibly through a decode-and-forward relaying strategy. Moreover, nodes are energy-constrained, as in the case of battery-powered or energy-harvesting communication networks. By solving a linear optimization problem, we devise the optimal communication strategy that maximizes the data rate in our network scenario. Our results highlight the tradeoff that exists between data rate and power constraints, and show the maximum rate performance when the average power consumption at the nodes is constrained to target values.