Broadcast scheduling in packet radio networks using Harmony Search algorithm

Packet radio networks have attracted many applications due to their flexible structure and ability to provide high-speed wireless communication between nodes distributed over a large region. Broadcast scheduling is commonly used to find a collision-free time division multiple access protocol frame that schedule transmissions for all nodes in a minimal number of timeslots with maximum number of transmissions. In this paper, we propose a Harmony Search (HS) based algorithm for the broadcast scheduling problem. The HS-based algorithm explores the search space effectively and efficiently by exploiting the search rules of randomness, experience, and variation of experience. The effectiveness and robustness of our proposed algorithm is demonstrated through solving a set of benchmark problems and comparing the results with previously proposed techniques. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in terms of quality of the solutions as well as computational time. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.