Joint routing, scheduling, and power control for multichannel wireless sensor networks with physical interference

Reliability and real-time requirements bring new challenges to the energy-constrained wireless sensor networks, especially to the industrial wireless sensor networks. Meanwhile, the capacity of wireless sensor networks can be substantially increased by operating on multiple nonoverlapping channels. In this context, new routing, scheduling, and power control algorithms are required to achieve reliable and real-time communications and to fully utilize the increased bandwidth in multichannel wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we develop a distributed and online algorithm that jointly solves multipath routing, link scheduling, and power control problem, which can adapt automatically to the changes in the network topology and offered load. We particularly focus on finding the resource allocation that realizes trade-off among energy consumption, end-to-end delay, and network throughput for multichannel networks with physical interference model. Our algorithm jointly considers 1) delay and energy-aware power control for optimal transmission radius and rate with physical interference model, 2) throughput efficient multipath routing based on the given optimal transmission rate between the given source-destination pairs, and 3) reliable-aware and throughput efficient multichannel maximal link scheduling for time slots and channels based on the designated paths, and the new physical interference model that is updated by the optimal transmission radius. By proving and simulation, we show that our algorithm is provably efficient compared with the optimal centralized and offline algorithm and other comparable algorithms. © 2011 South China University of Technology, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.