A Survey on Bandwidth Resource Allocation and Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks

Bandwidth resource allocation and scheduling has posed a challenging problem in wireless sensor networks. This paper provides a survey on the current state-of-the-art researches in this important area. Bandwidth reservation is considered in terms of time slot allocation in a pure TDMA or TDMA/CSMA based networks. We first overview different approaches for time slot allocation in a star network topology, and then elaborate the problem of time slot allocation and scheduling in a multihop wireless communication network in the presence of interference. Since the problem in multihop wireless network is proved to be NP-complete, most of the exiting solutions use different heuristics to resolve this problem. We address some of these heuristics and algorithms and their impact in wireless sensor networks. Finally, we provide some of the advantages, limitations and possible extensions in the context of IEEE 802.15.4 communications protocol which is being widely used for wireless sensor networks.