Intra-Cluster Communication Technique Re-using TDMA Idle Slots of Wireless Sensor Networks

To extend throughput, higher data packets sending is a challenge of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). A suitable data sending/communication mechanism needs to overcome this challenge. Most of the clustering method used TDMA for intra-cluster communication. In clustering, member nodes send data to Cluster Head (CH) in the TDMA time slot. CHs collect data from member nodes, combine them and send to next CH or Base Station (BS). If there is no data in a time slot (idle slot) of slot owner's node and if non-owner's nodes have data, then this slot remains empty in spite of data availability of other nodes. So overall data sending as well as throughput become degrade. We have proposed a protocol to overcome this limitation. We have used idle time slot of owner's node known as `slot reuse'. We send data with different power to CH in TDMA time slot (idle slot) of non-owner's node called. If TDMA slots of owner's node is idle, then there is a possibility of non-owner's node to send data. As we used different level of power of nonowner's node data according to amount of data, so there is also a scope to send a higher amount of data to CHs and overall throughput will increase. We have used capture effect to detect higher powered data. We have also used time slot and preamble adjustment to avoid collision. We have simulated our protocol and compared with traditional intra-cluster communication method like LEACH-C and another CSMA based intra-cluster communication technique (CICT) and found better performance in terms of throughput.