JOINTLY OPTIMAL ROUTING AND SCHEDULING IN PACKET RADIO NETWORKS

A multihop packet radio network is considered with a single traffic class and given end-to-end transmission requirements. A transmission schedule specifies at each time instant the set of links which are allowed to transmit. The purpose of a schedule is to prevent interference among transmissions from neighboring links. Given amounts of information are residing initially at a subset of the network nodes and must be delivered to a prespecified set of destination nodes. The transmission schedule that evacuates the network in minimum time is specified. The decomposition of the problem into a pure routing and a pure scheduling problem is crucial for the characterization of the optimal transmission schedule.