Minimizing tardiness in data aggregation scheduling with due date consideration for single-hop wireless sensor networks

Due date of data delivery is a key factor in timeliness-crucial wireless sensor networks (e.g. battlefield sensor networks, cyber-physical systems, and wireless multimedia sensor networks). Data aggregation is a well-known methodology to reduce transmission time. However, the decrease of transmission time does not definitely mean increasing the ratio of data delivery on time from the view of the whole network. In this paper, we studied how to minimize tardiness in data aggregation scheduling in consideration of due date for single-hop wireless sensor networks. Each data sensor has its own due date and data size. Tardiness penalty is induced if the finish time of data transmission is later than its due date for a data sensor. The scheduling problem is firstly formulated. A dynamic programming algorithm (DPS) is proposed for the problem which the data sizes of all data sensors are the same. A forward shift heuristic algorithm (FSH) and a variable neighborhood search heuristic algorithm (VSNH) are proposed to minimize the total transmission tardiness. Simulation experiments show that FSH outperforms the earliest deadline first and delay minimization aggregation algorithms. VSNH starting from the output of DPS is the best scheduling algorithm to solve the data aggregation scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing total transmission tardiness.