Interference-Aware Broadcast Scheduling in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we study theInterference-Aware Broadcast Scheduling problem, whereall nodes in the Euclidean plane have a transmission range and an interference range equal to r and alpha times r, for alpha at least 1, respectively. Minimizing latency is known to be NP-Hard even when alpha equals 1. The network radius D, the maximum graph distance from the source to any node, is also known to be a lower bound. We formulate the problem as Integer Programs (IP) and optimally solve moderate-size instances. We also propose six variations of heuristics, which require no pre-processesing of inputs, based on the number of receivers gained by each additional simultaneous broadcasting node. The experimental results show that the best heuristics give the solutions only 13-20% exceeding the optimum solutions. Further, an O(alpha D) schedule is proven to exist yielding an O(alpha) approximation algorithm.