Link scheduling for minimum delay in spatial re-use TDMA

Time division multiple access (TDMA) based medium access control (MAC) protocols provide QoS with guaranteed access to wireless channel. However, in multihop wireless networks, these protocols may introduce delay when packets are forwarded from an inbound link to an outbound link on a node. Delay occurs if the outbound link is scheduled to transmit before the inbound link. The total round trip delay can be quite large since it accumulates at every hop in the path. This paper presents a method that finds schedules with minimum round trip scheduling delay. We show that the scheduling delay can be interpreted as a cost collected over a cycle on the conflict graph. We use this observation to formulate a min-max program for the delay across a set of multiple paths. The min-max delay program is NP-complete since the transmission order of links is a vector of binary integer variables. We design heuristics to select appropriate transmission orders. Once the transmission orders are known, a modified Bellman-Ford algorithm is used to find the schedules. The simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm can find effective min-max delay schedules.