Routing-Aware Coloring in TDMA for Time-Critical Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

The authors present a novel TDMA coloring scheme for data aggregation applications in wireless sensor networks. This is based on previous work towards minimizing the TDMA frame size in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, they first investigate the modeling for data aggregation applications in sensor networks, find a theoretical lower bound for any TDMA based protocol, and then, present a TDMA-based MAC protocol that is derived from a hybrid node-based and edge-based coloring algorithm called RACCT (Routing Aware Coloring - Conflict Tolerant). Analytical and experimental results show that the authors' algorithm is not only affordable in implementation, but also yields near optimal system throughput in wireless sensor network data query applications.