Design optimization of delay-constrained routing in wireless sensor networks

Many researches emphasize on minimizing delays in forwarding data through the wireless sensor network, but different applications have different end-to-end delay requirements. Real-time communication should be provided by an effective routing protocol that may reduce delays on end-to-end communications. Large-scale applications often used multi-hop routing to reduce the transmission power and avoid long range transmission. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model for delay minimization. Our model aims to reduce delays by adopting paths with the minimum hop count, because successful communication becomes more unlikely when retransmissions become cumulative as the number of hops increases. We propose a mixed integer linear problem formulation that provides an optimal routing scheme. The influence of optimal routing of increasing the network performance and service quality is demonstrated by comparing several routing scenarios.