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 (TDMA) 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. TDMA-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) and scheduling-based protocols (e.g., NAMA) with significant energy savings.