Vertex coloring based distributed link scheduling for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents an energy-efficient distributed link scheduling protocol based on vertex coloring method for wireless sensor networks. In the protocol, we perform vertex coloring using maximum degree preferred scheme, and gather network information only by local message exchanges. Thus, our protocol can further reduce the maximum number of timeslots, and avoid long-distance multihop packet forwarding. To improve coloring success rate, two mechanisms are proposed in the protocol. The first is a broadcast guarantee mechanism for increasing broadcast message delivery rate; the second is a conflict processing mechanism for solving coloring conflicts. Simulation results show that the proposed distributed scheduling protocol has better performance than certain centralized scheduling protocols and a classical distributed protocol DRAND in energy efficiency, spatial reuse rate and packet loss rate.