A Study on Event-Driven TDMA Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

MAC protocol controls the activity of wireless radio of sensor nodes directly so that it is the major consumer of sensor energy and the energy efficiency of MAC protocol makes a strong impact on the network performance. TDMA-based MAC protocol is inherently collision-free and can rule out idle listening since nodes know when to transmit. However, conventional TDMA protocol is not suitable for event-driven applications. In this paper, the authors present ED-TDMA, an event-driven TDMA protocol for wireless sensor networks. Then they conduct extensive simulations to compare it with other MAC protocols such as BMA, S-MAC, and LMAC. Simulation results show that ED-TDMA performs better for event-driven application in wireless sensor networks with high-density deployment and under low traffic.