A Reliable Collision-free TDMA MAC for Sensor Networks

This paper proposes an energy-efficient and collision-free medium access control protocol named TDMA-S (Time division multiple access MAC protocol for Sensor networks). Nodes in TDMA-S schedule their transmissions based on neighborhood information to determine when they can transmit, listen or sleep. TDMA-S collects the neighborhood information using a distributed algorithm and avoids that two nodes within the interference range are assigned the same transmitting slot. The protocol is shown to be fair and reliable. Simulation results indicate that TDMA-S outperforms contention-based protocol (e.g., S-MAC) and schedule-based protocol (e.g., NAMA) in terms of delay and energy consumption.