Minimal Time and Conflict-Free Schedule for Convergecast in Wireless Sensor Networks

A time division multiple access (TDMA) scheduling technique, which solves collision problem and collects a complete data efficiently, is adopted to assign communication mission into the available time slots. This paper proposes a novel conflict-free convergecast scheduling method to minimize the collecting time in a wireless sensor network. The proposed method first constructs a tree structure in the sensor network and utilizes the tree information to schedule a conflict-free convergecast. The simulated results show that the proposed method can diminish the required timeslots efficiently and achieve a conflict-free convergecast. The contributions of the work are to accelerate the speed of data collection, collect the complete data from the sensor network, reduce the energy consumption of sensors and prolong the network lifetime.