Concurrent Transmission Based Data Sharing with Run-Time Variation of TDMA Schedule

Many-to-many data sharing protocols serve a very important role in many information management services. For low power decentralised systems such as IoT/WSN, the protocols need to be both fast and energy efficient. In this paper, we present our work on improving the speed and energy efficiency of an existing many-to-many data sharing protocol MiniCast. MiniCast uses a large and fixed TDMA schedule to carry out the data sharing operation. However, depending on the structure of the network, a large part of the schedule may remain unused leading to wastage of time and energy. We reduce this wastage by using different schedules at different time points in the data sharing process. Through simulation based study we show that such simple variations in schedule can bring up to 48% and 35% improvement in the latency and radio-on time, respectively, over the base protocol.