Computational Method Using Quantum Annealing for TDMA Scheduling Problem in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we consider a wireless sensor network where the network topology is a tree and medium access control is TDMA. We focus on TDMA scheduling problem studied in [1]. Since scheduling problems are considered as a member in the class of NP-hard, it is difficult to obtain the optimal solution in the scheduling problem. To overcome the difficulty, we develop a computational method using quantum annealing in order to find near-optimal solutions in the TDMA scheduling problem. We provide some numerical results to compare the computational method using quantum annealing with other methods in terms of quality of solution, computation time and size of problem.