On packet transmission scheduling for min-max delay and energy consumption in wireless mesh sensor networks

Optimization of channel utilization in wireless networks is typically based on transmission parallelization under signal-to-interference and noise constraint assuming minimum frame-length scheduling. In application scenarios like sensor networks this approach may not be suitable since it does not explicitly consider end-to-end packet delay nor energy consumption. In the paper we propose a mixed-integer programming formulation for scheduling optimization in wireless sensor networks characterized by periodic data gathering where minimization of the maximum packet delay and sensor node energy consumption are the main objectives. The model, which assumes cooperation in packet forwarding and interference cancellation, is compared to traditional single path forwarding.