A Classification Framework for TDMA Scheduling techniques in WSNs

Abstract: One of the major challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is the mitigation of collisions due to simultaneous transmissions by multiple nodes over a common channel which are located in a proximity. TDMA-based channel access provides energy-efficient and collision-free transmissions. It is especially suitable for traffic with periodic transmission patterns and guaranteed QoS requirements. For that reason, a large number of TDMA-scheduling algorithms are available in the literature, and consequently, a good number of survey papers on TDMA-scheduling algorithms have been written. In this work, we propose a novel classification framework to categorize the existing TDMA-scheduling algorithms available for WSNs. As against existing survey works, the proposed framework possess certain new dimensions (categories) to classify existing TDMA-scheduling algorithms. Additionally, we introduce a couple of new sub-categories for the existing classes which would help researchers to even differentiate between two TDMA-Scheduling algorithms that are assumed to be similar as per existing classification schemes. Finally, we also discuss few important works in the context of proposed classification scheme.