Lu, Mingming.

Multi-hop wireless networks are infrastructure-less networks consisting of mobile or stationary wireless devices, which include multi-hop wireless mesh networks and multi-hop wireless sensor networks. These networks are characterized by limited bandwidth and energy resources, unreliable communication, and a lack of central control. These characteristics lead to the research challenges of multi-hop wireless networks. Building up routing schemes with good balance among the routing QoS (such as reliability, cost, and delay) is a paramount concern to achieve high performance wireless networks. These QoS metrics are internally correlated. Most existing works did not fully utilize this correlation. We design a metric to balance the trade-off between reliability and cost, and build up a framework of utility-based routing model in multi-hop wireless networks. This dissertation focuses on the variations with applications of utility-based routing models, designing new concepts, and developing new algorithms for them. A review of existing routing algorithms and the basic utility-based routing model for multi-hop wireless networks has been provided at the beginning. An efficient algorithm, called MaxUtility, has been proposed for the basic utility-based routing model. MaxUtility is an optimal algorithm that can find the best routing path with the maximum expected utility.