Joint routing, scheduling and channel assignment in multi-power multi-radio wireless sensor networks

Power control is a complex issue in routing since the increase of transmission power supplies more opportunities to select optimal routes due to the fact that more links are available. However, conversely, it also implies higher interference and hence decreases the performance of routing. Since multi-radio multi-channel schemes can efficiently mitigate interferences through allowing more concurrent transmissions, therefore, it is worth to investigate the routing scheme in Multi-Power Multi-Radio (MPMR) wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we study the joint routing, scheduling, channel assignment and power control problem in MPMR WSNs, which is proven a NP-Hard problem. We first formulate the optimal routing problem as a linear programming problem. Subsequently, we develop a distributed routing protocol based on the random walk method which can efficiently decrease the computational complexity in large-scale WSNs by avoiding solving the linear programming problem. Theoretical analysis and simulations show that the routing based on MPMR can improve the data transmission efficiency and the proposed cross-layer routing scheme significantly reduces the energy consumption and the end-to-end transmission delay.