An event driven slot allocation approach to TDMA based WSN MAC design and its effect on latency

Abstract

Latency is a crucial design parameter for event driven WSN applications since as soon as a triggering event occurs, it is crucial to report it to the sink or cluster head immediately. Traditional TDMA based MAC protocols are not well appropriate for this kind of applications. In this paper, we introduce a new slot allocation approach which can be used in any TDMA based MAC design. It is shown that latency is reduced as a consequence of employing this approach compared to the conventional E-TDMA and BMA protocols.