Energy-Efficient Multi-User Routing in a Software-Defined Multi-Hop Wireless Network.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an innovative architecture that designs a logical controller to manage and program the network based on the global view, providing more efficient management, better performance, and higher flexibility for the network. Therefore, applying the SDN concept in a multi-hop wireless network (MWN) has been proposed and extensively studied to overcome the challenges of MWN. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient global routing algorithm for a software-defined multi-hop wireless network (SDMWN), which is able to get transmission paths for several users at the same time to minimize the global energy consumption with the premise of satisfying the QoS required by users. To this end, we firstly propose a Lagrange relaxation-based aggregated cost (LARAC) and K-Dijkstra combined algorithm to get the top K energy-minimum paths that satisfy the QoS in polynomial time. Then, we combine the alternative paths of each user obtained by K-LARAC and propose an improved genetic algorithm to solve the global routing strategy. The simulation results show that the proposed K-LARAC and genetic algorithm combined method has the ability to obtain an approximate optimal solution with lower time cost.