Minimum Delay Routing in Multihop Wireless Networks

End-to-end delay is an important QoS metric in multihop wireless networks such as sensor networks and mesh networks. Along with throughput, end-to-end delay determines the user-experienced data transmission time. End-to-end delay refers to the total time it takes for a single packet to reach the destination. It is a result of many factors including the length of the route and the interference level along the route, and therefore both the routing scheme and the MAC layer scheduling scheme can affect end-to-end delay. The authors assume a deterministic scheduling scheme is used at the MAC layer. Since the actual delay depends on the MAC layer scheduling algorithm, at the network layer they try to reduce the interference on the path instead of the actual delay time.