Access Scheduling on the Control Channels in TDMA Wireless Mesh Networks

The access scheduling on the control channels in TDMA wireless mesh networks is studied in this paper. The problem is to assign time-slots for each node in the network to access the control channels so that it is guaranteed that each node can broadcast the control packet to any one-hop neighbor in one scheduling cycle. The objective is to minimize the total number of different time-slots in the scheduling cycle. The original contributions of this paper are that it has taken the large interference range problem into consideration for the first time and proposed two algorithms for the scheduling problem, namely, the speak once algorithm and the speak separately algorithm. We prove that the number of time-slots by the second algorithm is upper-bounded by min(n, 2K) in some special cases, where n is the node number and K is the maximum node degree. The fully distributed versions of these algorithms are given in this paper. Simulation results also show that the performance of the speak separately algorithm is rather better than that of the speak once algorithm.