A New Iterated Local Search Algorithm for Solving Broadcast Scheduling Problems in Packet Radio Networks

The broadcast scheduling problem (BSP) in packet radio networks is a well-known NP-complete combinatorial optimization problem. The broadcast scheduling avoids packet collisions by allowing only one node transmission in each collision domain of a time division multiple access (TDMA) network. It also improves the transmission utilization by assigning one transmission time slot to one or more nodes; thus, each node transmits at least once in each time frame. An optimum transmission schedule could minimize the length of a time frame while minimizing the number of idle nodes. In this paper, we propose a new iterated local search (ILS) algorithm that consists of two special perturbation and local search operators to solve the BSPs. Computational experiments are applied to benchmark data sets and randomly generated problem instances. The experimental results show that our ILS approach is effective in solving the problems with only a few runtimes, even for very large networks with 2,500 nodes.