A Two-Phase Scheme for Distributed TDMA Scheduling in WSNs with Flexibility to Trade-off between Schedule Length and Scheduling Time

TL;DR

This paper introduces a two-phase distributed TDMA scheduling scheme for wireless sensor networks that balances schedule length and scheduling time, improving flexibility and performance over existing methods.

Contribution

A novel two-phase TDMA scheduling approach that allows adjustable trade-offs between schedule length and scheduling time in dynamic WSNs.

Findings

The proposed scheme achieves shorter schedules with less scheduling time.

Simulation results outperform existing algorithms in schedule efficiency.

The method provides flexible trade-offs suitable for dynamic network topologies.

Abstract

The existing distributed TDMA-scheduling techniques can be classified as either static or dynamic. The primary purpose of static TDMA-scheduling algorithms is to improve the channel utilization by generating a schedule of shorter length. But, they usually take a longer time to schedule, and hence, are not suitable for WSNs, in which the network topology changes dynamically. On the other hand, dynamic TDMA-scheduling algorithms generate a schedule quickly, but they are not efficient in terms of generated schedule length. In this paper, we propose a new approach to TDMA scheduling for WSNs, that bridges the gap between the above two extreme types of TDMA-scheduling techniques, by providing the flexibility to trade-off between the schedule length and the time required to generate the schedule (scheduling time). The proposed TDMA scheduling works in two phases. In the first phase, we generate a TDMA schedule quickly, which need not have to be very efficient in terms of schedule length. In the second phase, we iteratively reduce the schedule length in a manner, such that the process of schedule length reduction can be terminated after the execution of an arbitrary number of iterations, and still be left with a valid schedule. This step provides the capability to trade-off between schedule length and scheduling time. We have used Castalia network simulator to evaluate the performance of proposed TDMA-scheduling scheme. The simulation result together with theoretical analysis shows that in addition to the advantage of trading-off the schedule length with scheduling time, the proposed TDMA scheduling approach achieves better performance than existing algorithms in terms of schedule length and scheduling time.