A Negotiation-Based TDMA Scheduling with Consecutive Slots Assignment for Wireless Sensor Networks

TDMA protocols are recognized to save energy consumption by avoiding unnecessary idle listening and communication collision. As sensor nodes are usually equipped with limited resource supply, they are thus desirable to improve network capacity and energy efficiency by adopting TDMA scheduling for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper proposes a TDMA scheduling approach, which reuses time slots among sensor nodes, for WSNs. Specifically, with the idea of consecutive slots assignment, our approach can reduce both the time and energy cost of establishing nodes' schedule. Furthermore, the energy of node's switching is also reduced. To avoid the transmission of a node's result interference to all irrelevant receivers within its interference range, we develop a slot negotiation mechanism for slot assignment. We perform extensive simulations in NS-2 to evaluate our proposed approach. The results show that our approach outperforms existing TDMA scheduling in terms of time and energy overhead.