Approximation algorithms for minimum broadcast schedule problem in wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network usually consists of a large number of sensor nodes deployed in a field. One of the major communication operations is to broadcast a message from one node to the rest of the others. In this paper, we adopt the conflict-free communication model and study how to compute a transmission schedule that determines when and where a node should forward the message so that all nodes could receive the message in minimum time. We give two approximation algorithms for this NP-hard problem that have better theoretically guaranteed performances than the existing algorithms. The proposed approach could be applied to some other similar problems.