A Scheduling Algorithm for TDMA-Based MAC Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Because of the particularities of wireless sensor networks, the design of MAC protocol in wireless sensor networks should be paid main attention to minimize the energy consumption. Many schemes, which have significant contributions in power saving, can be found. However, these schemes concentrate on reducing the end-to-end delay, or on the energy saving. This paper proposes a TDMA-based scheduling scheme that balances energy saving and end-to-end delay. This balance is achieved by an appropriate scheduling of the path, which is assigned by graph coloring method. Our approach consists of two phases: in the first phase, we use genetic algorithm to get the graph coloring strategy, and we use this scheme to color the each path of the networks; then, we use the solution of the edge-coloring to schedule. This proposed scheme achieves the reduction of the end-to-end delay caused by sleep state while it maximizes the energy savings at the same time.