Patent ID: 8718026

Claim:
A method of assigning time slots to a transmission path in a wireless mesh network comprising a plurality of network nodes, the transmission path extending between a source node and a destination node in the wireless mesh network and comprising a plurality of consecutive links between adjacent network nodes of the plurality of network nodes, data being transmitted in the network based on the time slots by the assignment of time slots to be used for data transmission to links of a transmission path, the method comprising: determining a predetermined quality value produced from a number of the time slots assigned to a respective link within an assignment sequence and a predetermined quality value for the respective link within an assignment sequence of time slots which indicates an end-to-end data transmission from the source node to the destination node along the transmission path, the predetermined quality value indicating a reliability of the data transmission on a respective link for an individually assigned time slot; and determining an overall quality value as a function of quality values of respective links for the assignment sequence, determination of the assignment sequence comprising: assigning, consecutively, a time slot to each link of the links of the transmission path and determining an overall quality value for a resulting intermediate assignment sequence; assigning a further time slot to a link immediately after at least one time slot already assigned to the link of the transmission path and having a lowest quality value within the resulting intermediate assignment sequence, and determining the overall quality value for a new resulting intermediate assignment sequence while the overall quality value for the resulting intermediate assignment sequence is less than a predetermined minimum quality value; and defining the resulting intermediate assignment sequence as a determined assignment sequence if the overall quality value for the resulting intermediate assignment sequence is greater than the predetermined minimum quality value.