Design and performance evaluation of communication algorithms in multihop wireless networks with multiple channels

We propose and evaluate the performance of communication algorithms for the NPhard transmission time minimisation problem on multihop wireless networks modelled by directed graphs with multiple channels. We derive a lower bound for the minimum transmission time so that our heuristic solutions can be compared with optimal schedules. We present one randomised routing algorithm and nine heuristic transmission scheduling algorithms and demonstrate by extensive simulations on random multihop wireless networks that all these transmission scheduling algorithms have average-case performance reasonably close to that of optimal schedules. Furthermore, we show that the performance of our algorithms for undirected networks is significantly better than the pipelined breadth-first search tree algorithm by exploiting more transmission concurrency. We indicate that our transmission scheduling algorithms can be easily adapted to solve the related NP-hard throughput maximisation problem and present and compare their average-case performance by extensive simulations on random multihop wireless networks. We also demonstrate simulation data on the impact of the transmission power on transmission schedule length.