Routing-aware TDMA scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks

International audienceIn Wireless Sensor Networks, TDMA schedulings are designed at the data link layer in the layered protocol stack to improve some metrics as the latency. Decisions of routing at the network layer are dissociated of the MAC communication planning, which cannot globally optimize latency. Cross-layer designs overcome this problem by ensuring communications between protocols of different layers. A TDMA scheduling can be more efficient in terms of latency when using information of the routing protocol. In this context, we present IDeg-LO and IDeg-ReLO, new TDMA schedulings using information of the routing tree. We define a new metric per node, the interference degree, involved in the node ordering used by the slot allocation process. The simulation results show better performance of proposed scheduling algorithms compared to the state of the art. IDeg-LO improves average latency from 13.19% up to 44.14% depending on the routing tree, while IDeg-ReLO has better average latencyimprovements from 33.53% up to 53.33%