Minimum latency joint scheduling and routing in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are expected to be used in a wide range of applications from environment monitoring to event detection. The key challenge is to provide energy efficient communication; however, latency remains an important concern for many applications that require fast response. In this paper, we address the important problem of minimizing average communication latency for the active flows while providing energy-efficiency in wireless sensor networks. As the flows in some wireless sensor network can be long-lived and predictable, it is possible to design schedules for sensor nodes so that nodes can wake up only when it is necessary and asleep during other times. Clearly, the routing layer decision is closely coupled to the wakeup/sleep schedule of the sensor nodes. We formulate a joint scheduling and routing problem with the objective of finding the schedules and routes for current active flows with minimum average latency. By constructing a novel delay graph, the problem can be solved optimally by employing the M node-disjoint paths algorithm under FDMA channel model. We further present extensions of the algorithm to handle dynamic traffic changes and topology changes in wireless sensor networks. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.