New formulation for scheduling problem in multi-hop wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we consider a multi-hop sensor network, where the network topology is a tree, TDMA is employed as medium access control, and all data generated at sensor nodes are delivered to a sink node located on the root of the tree through the network. It is reported that if a transmission schedule that avoids interference between sensor nodes completely can be computed, TDMA is preferable to CSMA/CA in performance. However, solving the scheduling problem for TDMA is difficult, especially, in large-scale multi-hop sensor networks. In this paper, to formulate the scheduling problem for TDMA, we propose min-max model and min-sum model. While the min-max model yields the shortest schedule under the constraints, the min-sum model does not guarantee providing the shortest schedule. Numerical examples show that the min-sum model can provide good schedules in a reasonable CPU time, even when the min-max model fails to compute the shortest schedule in a reasonable CPU time.