Joint Routing and Scheduling in Mobile Aeronautical Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we formulate the joint Internet gateway allocation, routing, and scheduling problem in wireless ad hoc networks with the goal of minimizing the average packet delay in a space-time-division multiple-access (STDMA) network. We first propose a mathematical programming approach consisting of two steps: the minimization of the weighted hop count (mWHC) subject to scheduling constraints, followed by average delay minimization for the previously computed routes. Since the computational complexity of this approach is prohibitive for larger networks, we also formulate a genetic algorithm (GA) that can be applied to larger networks and mobile networks. We analyze the performance of both approaches by means of simulations and compare the solution that they provide to a simple hop-count-based routing and gateway selection solution. It is shown that the performance of the GA is comparable with the mathematical programming approach in terms of delay and packet delivery ratio (PDR) at lower complexity and is significantly better than the hop-count-based solution.