Evaluation of heuristic algorithms for scheduling, routing and power allocation in traffic sensitive spatial TDMA Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Major design issues in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks is the design of the routing algorithms and the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols. Spatial TDMA (STDMA) is a ldquoconflict-freerdquo MAC protocol for these networks, thus enabling high spectral utilization. In link-oriented STDMA, the schedule specifies when particular radio links will be activated. Moreover, the use of power control and heuristic routing algorithms have the potential of improving STDMA network performance. Besides Power and Traffic Adaptive STDMA, in this paper we also, as a comparison, include optimal STDMA. To obtain the optimal STDMA scheduling combined with routing and power allocation, a convex optimization problem is solved using the method reported in [1]. Our results show that one of the heuristic routing algorithms can provide near optimal solutions regarding end-to-end network throughput.