Motivated by the problem of link scheduling in wireless sensor networks where different sensors have different transmission and interference ranges and may be mobile, we study the problem of distance edge coloring of graphs which is a generalization of proper edge coloring. Let G be a graph modeling a sensor network. An ℓ-distance edge coloring of G is a coloring of the edges of G such that any two edges within distance ℓ of each other are assigned different colors. The parameter ℓ is chosen so that the links corresponding to two edges that are assigned the same color do not interfere. We investigate the ℓ-distance edge coloring problem on several families of graphs which can be used as topologies in sensor deployment. We focus on determining the minimum number of colors needed and on optimal coloring algorithms.