A Localized Slot Allocation Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

While energy efficiency is typically considered the major concern in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), many real-life applications also require reliability, timeliness, and scalability. In such scenarios, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) is typically used for data communication, as it avoids collisions and provides predictable latency and minimum energy consumption. TDMA requires a slot scheduling algorithm to allocate transmission slots to sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a decentralized slot allocation algorithm which is localized and self adaptive, i.e., each node selects its slot(s) and adapts its behavior only basing on locally-available information. We derive analytically the time taken by the algorithm and the average energy consumed by the network to achieve a complete schedule. We also show that our solution performs significantly better than another previous similar algorithm.