A Test-Based Scheduling Protocol (TBSP) for Periodic Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose TBSP, a TDMA protocol for gathering information periodically from multiple data sources to a central location across multiple hops. TBSP incurs a lower overhead than the existing protocols because it only requires the sensor nodes to keep track of their own schedule, whereas in the existing protocols each node needs to know the schedule of its neighbors. In order to gain a transmission slot, the sensor nodes transmit in different slots until they find one with sufficiently low interference. TBSP provides mechanisms to reduce the probability that the sensor nodes steal each other's slots or thwart each other's efforts. Our simulation study reveals that TBSP provides great energy savings if the network changes slowly and the sensor nodes can wait a dozen TDMA frames before obtaining a transmission slot. TBSP also provides the advantage of being more likely to keep the sensor network connected in sparse networks.