Degree-based link scheduling for collision avoidance in distributed wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of multiple sensor nodes, which communicate with each other under the constrained energy. Retransmissions caused by collision and interference during the communication among sensor nodes increase the transmission delay and reduce the energy efficiency. Link scheduling schemes are incorporated in the WSNs to improve the efficiency of the transmission among the sensor nodes. For collision and interference free communication in WSNs, TDMA based link scheduling schemes (i.e., sensors have the same wireless channel but different timeslots) have been researched. This paper proposes a degree-based link scheduling scheme to reduce the schedule length which eventually decreases the overall transmission delay. To decrease the schedule length, the proposed scheme assigns a time slot to all available links based on a collision avoidance maximal independent link set. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduces the schedule length by maximum 71% in comparison to an existing scheme, DCLS.