Novel low-latency data gathering scheduling for multi-radio wireless multi-hop networks

Abstract

Due to the complicated terrain, wireless multi-hop networks (WMNs) are often needed in large industrial environment. As the distribution of WMNs’ nodes in practical industrial environment are usually quite uneven, WMNs are prone to suffer from serious congestion during the data gathering. Employing multiple radios can help to mitigate the congestion. This is due to their flexible capability to concurrently schedule each node’s transmission and reception. Most existing works for multi-radio WMNs study the scheduling of gathering traffic flow at each node, while little work studies the scheduling of gathering a fixed amount of data at the nodes. The latter is quite typical in practice, quite complicated as the transmission load of each node in this scenario is dynamic and related to the descendant nodes’ scheduling. In this paper, we propose a novel low-latency scheduling for gathering a fixed amount of data spread in multi-radio WMNs. The proposed scheduling dynamically assigns each node’s radios for transmission, reception and their targets, according to the current amount of local data and the assignment of neighboring nodes’ radios. Extensive simulations are conducted and the results show the remarkable performance of the proposed scheduling, when compared to related scheduling methods.