An overview of slot assignment (SA) for TDMA

With the development of Medium Access Control (MAC) technologies, various Slot Assignment (SA) schemes have been proposed to enhance the overall performance of Time Division Multiple Address (TDMA) techniques, especially to achieve better slot utilization, higher system throughput, collision-free transmission and Quality of Service (QoS) provision in mobile, multi-hop wireless networks. Different kinds of SA schemes have been widely applied in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Tactical Data Link (TDL) networks. To our knowledge, hardly any survey works in SA field and thus it is certainly worthy giving an overview on various SA schemes. In this paper, we present a brief overview of SA schemes. The classification of SA schemes is described first, and then each SA mechanism is illustrated and analyzed. Finally, in accordance with their key features, we provide a qualitative comparison of the several typical SA schemes.