A TDMA Scheme for Mobile Sensor Networks

Abstract

We propose a TDMA-based protocol for mobile sensor networks. The proposed protocol overcomes the shortcomings of the other available TDMA-based protocols in a dynamic network where the cluster membership may change frequently. Unlike other existing TDMA-based protocols, we propose to vary the number of timeslots in the TDMA frame to allow underutilization of unused slots and successful allocation of timeslots to the newly joined sensors through minimizing collisions. The approach is fully decentralized and efficient to be used by the cluster head (leader) and the sensor nodes in a cluster. Simulations also show that the proposed mechanism provides significant performance improvements compared to the other existing approaches in terms of different network performance metrics.