TDMA Based Code Dissemination Protocol on an Integrated Positioning and Sensing System

Over-the-air programming (OAP) protocols play a key role in wireless sensor network maintenance and task assignment. Most existing OAP protocols are contention based and suffer from collisions and the hidden terminal problem. We propose a novel TDMA based code dissemination service called WCDS that has been implemented on our WASP platform, which is a high performance integrated sensing, communication, and positioning system. WCDS is designed as a background service without interfering with normal network operations, in contrast to the existing OAP protocols that freeze sensing and data service during code download. We implement hand-shaking, pipelining and time slot scheduling to achieve high reliability and fast completion time. Experimental results show that WCDS outperform Deluge by 30% in completion time and up to 40% in energy saving.