A Modified Discrete Differential Evolution based TDMA scheduling scheme for many to one communications in wireless sensor networks

Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) plays an important role in MAC (Medium Access Control) for wireless sensor networks providing real-time guarantees and potentially reducing the delay and also it saves power by eliminating collisions. In TDMA based MAC, the sensor are not allowed to radiate signals when they are not engaged. On the other hand, if there are too many switching between active and sleep modes it will also unnecessary waste energy. In this paper, we have presented a multi-objective TDMA scheduling problem that has been demonstrated to prevent the wasting of energy discussed above and also further improve the time performance. A Modified Discrete Differential Evolution (MDDE) algorithm has been proposed to enhance the converging process in the proposed effective optimization framework. Simulation results are given with different network sizes. The results are compared with the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the original Discrete DE algorithm (DDE). The proposed MDDE algorithm has successfully outperformed these three algorithms on the objective specified, which is the total time or energy for data collection.