Abstract: The limitation and the inappropriate allocation of network resource would be critical in wireless sensor networks. Considering both network flow control and transmission cost, this paper defined the subtraction between source utility and transmission cost as the net utility of the sensor network. By formulating the rate allocation and the transmission control based on multipath network coding as the optimization problem, a decentralized algorithm was proposed to solve it through the convex optimization and the Lagrange dual approach. And the network utility is maximized and the transmission cost is minimized at the same time. The performance of the proposed algorithm was validated through numerical experiments.

Key words: wireless sensor network, multicast, distributed algorithms, net utility, convex optimization