An energy-efficient TDMA MAC for wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes an energy-efficient and collision-free medium access control protocol TDMA-WSN for wireless sensor networks. The protocol is based on Time Division Multiple Access (TDAM) principle and reduces energy consumption by avoiding overhearing, collision and idle listening. Nodes in TDMA-WSN build schedules based on information about their neighborhood to determine when they can transmit to their neighbors and when they should listen to the channel or sleep. TDAM-WSN proposes a novel resolution with three-d-hop neighborhood information to avoid collision caused by the two-hop collision-free principle used in some protocols. TDMA-WSN can accelerate passing message by arranging schedule based on routing information from the upper-layer. The simulation results indicate that TDMA-WSN outperforms contention-based protocols (e.g., S-MAC [1]) and scheduling-based protocols (e.g., NAMA [2]) with significant energy savings.