Heuristics for scheduling periodic real-time streams in wireless sensor networks

Simultaneous transmissions in the same radio range of a wireless sensor network causes interference and packets are lost. Knowing the interference pattern in advance, the transmission links can be scheduled so that no packet is lost due to interference and all streams meet their deadlines. This problem is NP-hard in general and therefore we resort to heuristics. In this paper, we present a set of heuristics for scheduling periodic, real-time data streams over a wireless sensor network. Simulation results show that our heuristics produce feasible schedules in almost all cases.