Improved algorithm for broadcast scheduling of minimal latency in wireless ad hoc networks

A wide range of applications for wireless ad hoc networks are time-critical and impose stringent requirement on the communication latency. One of the key communication operations is to broadcast a message from a source node. This paper studies the minimum latency broadcast scheduling problem in wireless ad hoc networks under collision-free transmission model. The previously best known algorithm for this NP-hard problem produces a broadcast schedule whose latency is at least 648(r _max/r _min)² times that of the optimal schedule, where r _max and r _min are the maximum and minimum transmission ranges of nodes in a network, respectively. We significantly improve this result by proposing a new scheduling algorithm whose approximation performance ratio is at most (1 + 2r _max/r _min)² + 32. Moreover, under the proposed scheduling each node just needs to forward a message at most once.