A scalable joint routing and scheduling scheme for large-scale wireless sensor networks

The multihop configuration of a large-scale wireless sensor network enables multiple simultaneous transmissions without interference within the network. Existing time division multiple access (TDMA) scheduling schemes exploit gain based on the assumption that the path is optimally determined by a routing protocol. In contrast, our scheme jointly considers routing and scheduling and introduces several new concepts. We model a large-scale wireless sensor network as a tiered graph relative to its distance from the sink, and introduce the notion of relay graph and relay factor to direct the next-hop candidates toward the sink fairly and efficiently. The sink develops a transmission and reception schedule for the sensor nodes based on the tiered graph search for a set of nodes that can simultaneously transmit and receive. The resulting schedule eventually allows data from each sensor node to be delivered to the sink. We analyze our scheduling algorithm both numerically and by simulation, and we discuss the impact of protocol parameters. Further, we prove that our scheme is scalable to the number of nodes, from the perspectives of mean channel capacity and maximum number of concurrent transmission nodes. Compared with the existing TDMA scheduling schemes, our scheme shows better performance in network throughput, path length, end-to-end delay, and fairness index.