Abstract—In this paper, we formulate a flow control optimization problem for wireless sensor networks with lifetime constraint and link interference in an asynchronous setting. Our formulation is based on the network utility maximization framework, in which a general utility function is used to characterize the network performance such as throughput. To solve the problem, we propose a fully asynchronous distributed algorithm based on dual decomposition, and theoretically prove its convergence. The proposed algorithm can achieve the maximum utility. Extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm and validate the analytical results. Index Terms—flow control, sensor networks, asynchronous setting, dual decomposition. I.

In infocommunications networks the available bandwidth typically varies in time. The transmission rate of elastic traffic can be tuned according to the actual network state. Assuming such elastic traffic there arises the problem how to allocate resources (bandwidth) to sources in a fair manner and how to protect connections against failures. In recent related works the paths of the demands are given in advance, consequently setting up elastic source rates in fair way leads to suboptimal solution. Better results can be achieved if we determine the bandwidth of elastic sources AND the routes used by these demands simultaneously. In several applications it is meaningful to define minimum and maximum rate for sources. For this case we propose the definition of Relative Fairness (RF). In this paper different resource allocation...