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International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering

Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 4, Issue 6, June 2014)

A Survey on TDMA-based MAC Protocols for Wireless


Sensor Network
Pijus Kumar Pal1, Punyasha Chatterjee2
School of Mobile Computing and Communication, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
Therefore, a MAC protocol plays an important role in
enabling efficient network operation and achieving good
network performance.
There are many types of MAC protocols, designed for
WSN so far. In TDMA based MAC protocols, time are
divided into time-frames and each time-frame is further
divided into a fixed number of time-slots as shown in
Figure 1. Each node is allocated a time-slot in a time-frame
and is allowed to transmit only in the allocated time-slot.
Furthermore, a node depending on the schedules of its
neighboring nodes may remain in the sleep mode when it is
neither to transmit, nor to receive, i.e. can switch off their
transceiver conserving appreciable amount of energy [23].
In this paper we are giving the overview of several TDMA
based MAC protocols developed for WSN.
Rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II
describes the different categories of WSN MAC protocols;
Section III describes the factors that influence sensor
network MAC design. Section IV presents various TDMA
based MAC protocols both centralized and distributed and
finally Section V concludes the paper.

Abstract Recent advancement in micro-electromechanical systems (mems) have enabled the development of
Wireless sensor Network (WSN) which is gaining popularity
day by day and is used in wide range of applications. The
sensor nodes that constitute WSN have several constraints like
limited battery power, memory constraint, limited bandwidth
etc. Therefore designing an efficient MAC layer protocol is a
challenging task. TDMA-based MAC protocols can avoid
collisions, overhearing and idle listening and therefore energy
efficient. In this paper, we firstly describe a brief account of
the factors influencing WSN MAC design. Then, we describe
several TDMA-based MAC protocols both centralized and
distributed which are proposed so far for wireless sensor
network.
Keywords MAC Layer, Scheduling, Time Division
Multiple Access (TDMA), Wireless Sensor Network (WSN).

I. INTRODUCTION
Recent technological advances have enabled the
development of low cost, low power & multifunctional
sensor devices. These autonomous devices with integrated
sensing, processing, and communication capabilities are
called sensor nodes. A sensor node is an electronic device
that is capable of detecting environmental conditions such
as temperature, sound, or the presence of certain objects.
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) typically consists of a
large number of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to
monitor certain environmental and physical phenomenon
and cooperate with each other to perform the designated
task and send the information to the Base Station (BS) or
the Access Point (AP).
Medium access control (MAC) is one of the critical
issues in the design of wireless sensor networks. As in
most wireless networks, collision, which is caused by two
nodes sending data at the same time over the same
transmission medium, is a great concern in WSNs. To
address this problem, a sensor network must employ a
MAC protocol to arbitrate access to the shared medium in
order to avoid data collision from different nodes and at the
same time to fairly and efficiently share the bandwidth
resources among multiple sensor nodes.

Figure 1. TDMA Frame Structure

II. CATEGORIES OF WSN MAC PROTOCOLS


MAC protocols for wireless sensor network can be
broadly classified into two categories: Contention-based
MAC protocols and Schedule-based MAC protocols.
A. Contention-based MAC Protocols
In contention-based MAC protocols, all nodes share a
common medium and contend for the medium for
transmission. Thus, collision may occur during the
contention process. To avoid collision, shared channel
access can be arbitrated through some probabilistic
coordination.

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International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering


Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 4, Issue 6, June 2014)
The sender listens to the shared medium before
transmission, waits a random period of time if the medium
is busy and then tries again. It is better for networks, where
the contention is low and burst traffic is expected.
Both ALOHA (Additive Link On-line Hawaii System)
and CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access) are the most
typical examples of contention-based MAC protocols [2].

So, the MAC layer needs to consider this issue as it


directly controls radio activities in order to prolonging the
network lifetime.
B. Scalability and Adaptivity
The number of sensor nodes deployed in studying a
phenomenon may vary. Depending on the application, it
can be in the order of hundreds, thousands or the number
may reach an extreme value of millions. Some nodes in the
network may die, some new nodes may join or due to
mobility some nodes may move to new location. A good
MAC protocol should accommodate such changes
gracefully.

B. Schedule-based MAC Protocols


In schedule-based MAC protocol, nodes' access to the
shared medium is divided in respect to either time (Time
Division Multiple Access) or frequency (Frequency
Division Multiple Access) or orthogonal pseudo - noise
codes (Code Division Multiple Access) [2]. This allows
different nodes to access the shared medium without
interfering with each other and thus effectively avoids
collisions.
Contention-based MAC protocols consume more energy
as compared to Schedule-based MAC protocols specially
TDMA-based protocols, because they waste energy in
collisions [20] and idle listening in the network. They also
cant provide delay guarantees [19]. A good schedule not
only avoids collisions by silencing the interferers of every
receiver node in each time slot but also minimizes the
frame-size hence the end-to-end communication latency.
Apart from all the positive parts of TDMA, it has some
negative impacts too. Firstly, TDMA uses topology
information for scheduling purpose which comes in the
form of neighboring and interference relationships among
nodes. But it is very dicult to precisely capture these
interference relationships because of interference range
irregularity [21]. Secondly, it has limited scalability and
adaptability to network changes. Thirdly, TDMA requires
strict time synchronization for the time-slots [18].
However, a guaranteed packet delivery and bounded
latency are highly desirable in real-time applications, which
can be ensured in TDMA.

C. Latency
Latency refers to the time-delay between the time when
a packet is sent by the sender and the time when that packet
is successfully received by the receiver. In case of sensor
network application with stringent latency requirements (e.
g., real - time monitoring of bush fires), the detected event
must be reported to the sink node in real time so that the
appropriate action could be taken.
D. Channel Utilization
This reflects how well the entire bandwidth of the
channel is utilized in communication. Bandwidth is a
valuable resource in wireless communication. So, the MAC
protocols designed for WSN should maximize the
utilization of this scared resource.
E. Throughput
Throughput refers to the amount of data successfully
transferred from a sender to a receiver in a given time. This
is usually measured in bits or bytes per second. Similar to
latency, the importance of throughput depends on different
applications.
F. Fairness
Fairness refers to the ability of different sensor nodes in
the network to equally share a common transmission
channel among them. As the nodes in WSN cooperate with
each other to accomplish a single common task, it is
important not to achieve per-node fairness, but to ensure
the quality of service for the whole task.

III. FACTORS INFLUENCING WSN MAC DESIGN


According to [22], to design an efficient MAC protocol
for WSN, attributes such as Energy-efficiency, Scalability
and Adaptivity, Latency, Channel utilization, Throughput,
Fairness etc. are to be considered. In this section, brief
description of each of the attributes will be given.

IV. TDMA-BASED MAC PROTOCOLS


In TDMA-based MAC protocol, the total time duration
of communication is divided into a fixed number of timeslots. TDMA configures these time-slots into time-frames
that repeat periodically.

A. Energy-efficiency
As the sensor nodes are battery powered, it is almost
impossible to change or recharge the batteries of the nodes.
The radio is the major consumer of energy in many
hardware platforms.
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Each node in the sensor network is allocated a fixed
number of time-slots and is allowed to transmit only in the
allocated time-slots in each frame. In this section, a number
of TDMA-based MAC protocols developed for wireless
sensor network are described in brief. Based on the nature
of the algorithms, we have classified the protocols in two
groups: Centralized protocols and Distributed protocols.

The cluster head sets up and broadcasts a transmission


schedule for the source nodes, the nodes that wish to send
its data. Then the system enters into the data transmission
period. During the data transmission period, each source
node turns on its radio and sends its data to the cluster-head
over its allocated slot-time, and keeps its radio off at all
other times. All the other nodes (non-source nodes) keep
their radios off during the data transmission period. When a
session nishes, the next session begins with a contention
period and the same procedure is repeated. The cluster head
collects the data from all the source nodes and forwards the
aggregated and compressed data to the base station.

A. Centralized TDMA Protocols


In Centralized TDMA protocols, the Base Station (BS)
or the Cluster-Head (CH) (in case of Hierarchical WSN)
centrally schedules different slots to different nodes in the
network. Every node uses these time-slots for data
communication. In this sub-section, a number of
centralized TDMA protocols are described.
1) Bit-map-assisted MAC Protocol: Bit-map-assisted
(BMA) MAC Protocol [3] is an intra-cluster
communication MAC protocol for large-scale cluster-based
WSNs. BMA is intended for event-driven applications
where sensor nodes transmit data only when significant
events are observed.
BMA operation is divided into rounds. An example of a
complete round is depicted in Figure 2. Each round is
divided into cluster set-up phase and steady-state phase.
During cluster set-up phase, cluster-head is determined
based on nodes energy levels. This is done using nonpersistent CSMA and elected node broadcasts an
advertisement message claiming to be the new clusterhead. The steady-state phase is divided into k-sessions with
fixed duration. Each session consists of a contentionperiod, a data-transmission period and an idle period.
During each contention period, all nodes keep their radios
on. The contention period follows a TDMA-like schedule:
each node is assigned a specic slot and the nodes transmit
a 1-bit control message to the cluster-head during its
scheduled slot if it has data to transmit; otherwise, its
scheduled slot remains empty. After the contention period
is over, the cluster head has complete knowledge about the
nodes in the network.

Advantages- Significant energy savings is possible in


BMA. The nodes have average packet latency and utilize
the bandwidth efficiently.
Disadvantages- The disadvantage of this protocol is that
it is superior for only the cases of low and medium
traffic loads.
2) Self- organized TDMA Protocol for WSN: SelfOrganized TDMA protocol (SOTP) [4] is a cross layer
protocol to serve the application-specific and data-centric
nature of WSN. SOTP applies across-layer design to
achieve superior energy efficiency and lower transmission
delay via a TDMA MAC scheme.
In SOTP the
transmission range of base station is much larger than that
of the other sensors in the network. It is assumed that the
base station can broadcast data to all sensor nodes while a
sensor node can reach their immediate neighbors via one
hop. Here, time is divided into frames and each frame is
divided into slots. It is assumed that the number of slots in
one frame is larger than the number of sensor nodes in
whole sensor network.
The operation of SOTP is divided into frames. Each
frame consists of five types of time slot: Broadcasting slot
(BR), Carrier Sensing slot (CS), Transmitting slot (TX),
Receiving slot (RX) and Idle slot (ID). A BR slot is always
the first slot in the frame and a CS slot is the second. Each
node runs in one of the three states: searching,
synchronized, or registered. A node when boots up, it is in
searching state (except for base station, it boots up in
registered state). The base station periodically broadcasts
slot allocation packets (SAP). A node (in searching state),
when detects and receives the broadcast SAP from the base
station, it moves into synchronized state and picks up one
unoccupied slot as its TX slot, selects one of its neighbor
registered nodes as its father node, and sends out a register
packet (REG). After the base station receives the REG
packet, it allocates the unoccupied slot and sends this
information in the next SAP packet.

Figure 2. Illustration of a Single Round in BMA [3]

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International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering


Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 4, Issue 6, June 2014)
A node when receives this, it moves to the registered
state. A node in the registered state can have one father node
and several child nodes. Every node sets the TX slots of its
child nodes as its own RX slots.
Advantages- SOTP is energy efficient due to its pure
TDMA and non-clustering architecture. It reduces
transmission delay efficiently.
Disadvantages- This protocol assumes the transmission
range of the base station is such that it can cover all the
other sensor nodes in the network. Data aggregation and
compression is left to the upper layers and it is assumed
that such aggregation and compression will not add to the
delay of multi-hop transmission.
3) Event Driven TDMA Protocol: Event Driven TDMA
Protocol (ED-TDMA) [5] is an energy efficient TDMA
protocol for event driven application in wireless sensor
network. ED-TDMA improves channel utilization by
changing the length of TDMA frame according to the
number of source nodes and saves energy with a
bitmap-assisted
TDMA
schedule. ED-TDMA also
employs intra-cluster coverage to prolong network lifetime
and to improve system scalability.
The operation of ED-TDMA protocol is divided into
rounds. Each round begins with a set-up phase followed by
a steady phase. The Set-up phase includes clustering and
time synchronization. An example of TDMA frame
structure of ED-TDMA is shown in Figure 3. It begins with
a reservation phase, followed by a TDMA schedule and
data transmission.
The reservation phase consists of m mini-slot where m is
the number of members in the cluster. The members
occupy the mini-slot according to their ID. Node with
maximum ID occupies the first mini-slot while node with
minimum ID occupies the last mini-slot, and so on. If a
node has data to send in the current frame it sends a 1-bit
RSV (Reservation) message to the cluster head. The length
of the reservation phase is m bit.

The first k bit parts represent piggybacking reservation


of the previous frame. The second m-bit part represents the
reservation in the current frame.

Figure 4. TDMA schedule packet of ED-TDMA [5]

In the transmission phase a node sends data to the cluster


head during its data slot. If it has more data to send in next
frame, it can book a data slot in the next frame by
piggybacking a flag in the data packet.
Advantages- The energy consumption is reduced in each
node thereby network lifetime is prolonged. This protocol
performs better for event-driven application with highdensity deployment and under low traffic in wireless sensor
network.
Disadvantages- Energy consumption of ED-TDMA
depends on the monitoring area. As this is cluster-based
protocol, there would be larger overheads such as cluster
management, time synchronization under large monitoring
area. So, energy utility efficiency of ED-TDMA decreases
drastically with the enlargement of monitoring area.
4) Mobility Tolerant TDMA-based MAC Protocol:
Mobility tolerant TDMA-based MAC Protocol [6] is a new
TDMA based MAC protocol which can be used in mobile
wireless sensor network. In this protocol it is assumed that
the network is static during its set-up phase, cluster-head
has less mobility with more battery power and the
synchronization is done automatically. The other nodes in
the cluster have same capability.
According to this protocol, whole network is divided
into clusters. Each cluster is owned by a cluster-head. The
time is divided into frames (N) and in turn into time slots as
shown in Figure 5.
Before every time frame, the Cluster-head allocates a
time slot to every node (n) in the cluster and x slots are
left free for the nodes that join the cluster in later part of
the time frame. This x is generally considered to be 10% of
number of nodes in a cluster. The node which holds the
current slot is known as owner node. Whenever a new node
comes and joins the cluster, the Cluster-head allocates half
of the free time slots (x/2 slots) to this new node. If another
comes and joins the cluster, it is allocated half of the current
free slots (x/4). Therefore a cluster will have some empty
slot at anytime in the time frame to allocate to a new node
that joins the cluster.

Figure 3. Frame structure of ED-TDMA [5]

In TDMA schedule phase, the cluster head broadcasts a


schedule packet according to the RSV packet received in
the reservation phase. The schedule packet format is shown
in Figure 4. This frame consists of two parts.

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International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering


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In order to improve channel utilization, each time slot is
further divided into 3 sections: Communication Request
(CR), Channel Allocation (CA) and Data Section (DS). In
communication request (CR) section, owner node collects
the information about the surrounding nodes. All those
nodes that have data to transmit will put requests to the
owner node for the grant of slot for data transmission. If the
owner node doesnt have any data to transmit then it
will calculate the Priority Index (PI) of each node that
has put a request for grant of a time slot. Among the
slot requested nodes, the node with less PI is given
more priority.

1) Self- Organizing Medium Access Control: Selforganizing medium access control for sensor networks
(SMACS) [7] is a distributed MAC protocol which enables
a collection of nodes to discover their neighbors and
establish schedules for communicating with them without
the need for any local or global master nodes. In SMACS,
each sensor node is able to turn its radio on and off, and
tune the carrier frequency to different bands as per
requirements.
The number of available bands is relatively large. In
order to form a flat topology, the neighbor discovery and
channel assignment phases are combined. A channel is
assigned to a link immediately once the existence of the
link is discovered. Therefore, by the time all nodes hear
from all their neighbors, they will have formed a connected
network, where there is at least one multi-hop path between
any two distinct nodes. In SMACS, only partial
information about radio connectivity in the vicinity of a
node is used to assign timeslots to each links. Each node
maintains a TDMA-like frame called super-frame, in which
it schedules different timeslots to communicate with its
known neighbors. In each timeslot, a node only
communicates with one neighbor. Each link operates on a
different frequency, which is chosen randomly from a large
pool of frequencies when the links are established. This
reduces the probability of collision during channel
assignment. After a link is established, a node knows when
to turn on its transceiver to communicate with another node
and will turn off when there is no communication.
Advantages: In SMACS, link assignment is done
without a need for collecting global connectivity
information or even connectivity information that reaches
farther than one hop away. Hence, significant energy
savings can be achieved.
Disadvantages: The drawback of SMACS is its low
bandwidth utilization. For example, if a node only has
packets to be sent to one neighbor, it cannot reuse the
timeslots scheduled for other neighbors.
2) Power Aware Clustered TDMA: Power Aware
Clustered TDMA (PACT) [8] is an energy-efficient
TDMA-based MAC protocol for a large population of
sensors interconnected by a wireless multi-hop network.
The key features of PACT are listed below:

Figure 5. Schematic of Mobility tolerant TDMA Based MAC Protocol


[6]

In Channel Allocation (CA) section, the node decides


whether to send the data and keep the channel to it or allots
the channel to a cluster node which has requested for a slot
and has the highest priority. Packets are transmitted or
received in this Data Section. After the communication
process is over the node goes into sleep as often as possible
in order to save the battery power.
Advantages- It is very good energy conserving MAC
protocol and another important observation is that it has
relatively very less delay as compared to other traditional
TDMA-based MAC protocol
Disadvantages- This protocol assumes the network to be
static during its setup phase and can tolerate less mobility
of the cluster heads.
B. Distributed TDMA Protocols
In Distributed TDMA protocols, scheduling is done by
the nodes themselves based on the local information that
they have. There is no need of any centralized entity (BS or
CH). So, here the message communication is very less
compared to the centralized algorithms and hence it is more
energy efficient. In this sub-section, a number of
distributed TDMA protocols for WSN are discussed.

PACT uses passive clustering that allows nodes to


take turns to become the communication backbone
nodes. The role of the cluster heads and the gateways
are rotated to save energy.

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PACT adapts duty cycles of the nodes to user traffic.
In other words, the radios are turned off if the
network is inactive.
A simple selection scheme is used to limit the number
of active gateways between neighboring cluster heads.
PACT provides a clustered structure which can be
utilized by high level protocols to reduce global
communication overhead. This helps PACT to be an
efficient protocol for large sensor networks.
In PACT, there are two common slot assignment
schemes usually referred to as node activation and link
activation. For node activation schemes, each node is
assigned a single time slot in each TDMA frame and the
node can use this slot to transmit to any neighbor. On the
other hand, a link allocation scheme assigns time slots
based on each directed links. A node can transmit a
packet to its neighbor only during the time slot that is
assigned to the directed link for that neighbor.

3) Distributed Energy-Aware MAC Protocol: The


distributed energy -aware MAC (DE - MAC) [9] protocol
is a TDMA based MAC protocol for addressing the energy
management problem in WSNs. The DE-MAC protocol
exploits the inherent features of TDMA to avoid energy
waste caused by collision and control overhead, and
employs a periodical listening and sleeping mechanism to
avoid idle listening and overhearing. Unlike some existing
MAC protocols that treat all nodes equally with respect to
energy conservation, DE-MAC treats those critical nodes
(i.e., with lower energy) differently by using them less
frequently to achieve load balancing among all nodes. A
group of neighbor nodes periodically perform a local
election process based on their energy levels to elect the
worst-off node(s) as the winner(s) and let the winner(s)
sleep more than its (or their) neighbor nodes. The protocol
initially assigns the same number of transmission slots to
each node in a TDMA frame. A node can independently
decide to initiate an election if its current energy level is
below a threshold value. Once an election is initiated, each
node sends its energy level to all of its neighbors, which is
included to its regularly scheduled transmission packet
during its scheduled timeslot. To receive the energy level
information from other nodes, all nodes listen to all
transmitted packets. There are no sleeping nodes when
other nodes are transmitting. This is to enable the
integration of leader-election with regular TDMA
transmission and thus save bandwidth. At the end of the
election process, the node with the minimum energy level
is elected as a winner. Once one or more winners are
elected, all the losers reduce the number of their timeslots
by a constant factor (e.g., two) and the winners have
timeslots twice the number of the losers.
Advantages: In DE-MAC, the idling listening time of
those critical nodes are reduced, leading to more energy
savings in the critical nodes thereby increases network
lifetime.
Disadvantages: As the low energy nodes sleep for more
time (they perform only sensing activity), this introduces
end-to-end delay to be more as compared to other TDMA
based MAC protocols.
4) Traffic Adaptive MAC Protocol: The traffic-adaptive
medium access (TRAMA) [10] protocol is a TDMA based
MAC protocol to provide energy-efficient collision-free
channel access in WSNs while maintaining good
throughput, acceptable latency, and fairness. In TRAMA,
nodes switch to a low-power idle state when they are not
transmitting or receiving, thereby TRAMA saves
significant amount of energy.

Figure 6. PACT TDMA Structure [8]

Figure 6 shows the general TDMA structure of PACT.


Each frame consists of control mini slots and data slots.
All nodes turn their radio on during the control mini slots.
Every node broadcasts the allocation of the data slots
assignments to its neighbors using its assigned mini slot.
Each node learns the data slot assignment status from these
control packets and choose non-conflicting transmission
allocations. Each node shuts its radio off during those time
slots in which it does not send or receive any packet.
Advantages- It is the first TDMA protocol that uses
clustering to take advantages of the dense topology to
preserve energy and prolong the network lifetime. It adapts
energy consumption to user traffic.
Disadvantages- As clustering is unavoidable in PACT,
an amount of overhead, it may be very less, is still there
due to clustering.
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The goal is to schedule sensor-to-sink ows by
scheduling a slot for transmission and reception at each hop
along the path that does not interfere with the existing
ows.
In BTDOS, the channel is divided into two sub channels,
one for data and one control channels for busy tones. Busy
tones do not need to be demodulated, but neighbors must
be able to detect the presence of the busy tone signal on the
control channel. It is assumed that the transmission ranges
of control channel and data channel are chosen as such that
the interference becomes sufficiently low. Thus, busy tones
are used to avoid the hidden terminal because receivers can
emit a busy tone while they are receiving data. This allows
the neighbors to know that a transmission would interfere
with the receivers packet reception.
In BTODS, a node will transmit a busy tone under the
following conditions:

Time is divided into a series of random-access periods


and scheduled-access periods (Figure 7), which alternate
with each other. A random-access period, also referred to
as a signaling slot, is further divided into smaller signaling
slots and a scheduled-access period, also referred to as a
transmission slot, into smaller transmission slots. The
TRAMA protocol starts with a random access period where
each node randomly selects a timeslot and then transmits.
A node can only join the network during a random access
period.
The TRAMA protocol consists of three components: the
neighbor protocol (NP), the schedule exchange protocol
(SEP), and the adaptive election algorithm (AEA). Both the
NP and the SEP allow nodes to exchange 2 - hop
neighborhood information and their schedules. The AEA
uses the neighbor and schedule information to select
transmitters and receivers for the current timeslot, allowing
all other nodes to switch to a low - power mode.

It is receiving on the data channel.


It overhears another node sending on the data
channel.
Figure 8 shows the timing diagrams for BTODS slots
with unicast data. In this figure (Figure 8), Trand_1 is chosen
uniformly at random from (Tmin , Trand ) and Trand_1 + Trand_2
= Trand to keep the slots aligned. T min is chosen to be long
enough to allow a nodes busy tone to be propagated to its
two-hop neighbors. Every slot begins with an idle listening
period of to account for synchronization errors. Data that
has been previously scheduled in a slot will receive priority
over data which is attempting to be scheduled in the slot.
ODS is similar to BTODS, but does not use busy tones.
The slot structure of ODS is shown in Figure 9. Here nodes
use extra periods to indicate they will be busy sending or
receiving in the current slot. These slots are T TX_busy and
TRX_busy. When a node is scheduled to send data in the
current slot, it will transmit on the data channel during the
TTX_busy period. A node will transmit on the data channel
during the TRX_busy period if either it is scheduled to receive
data in the current slot or it heard another node transmit
during the TTX_busy period. The latter case indicates another
node is already scheduled to transmit in the current slot.
Thus, a node which detects the data channel busy during
the TTX_busy period must indicate that it will not be able to
receive in the current slot to all potential senders, which it
does during the TRX_busy period.

Figure 7. Time Slot Structure in TRAMA [10]

Advantages- In this algorithm, less collision probability


is achieved. Higher percentage of sleep time helps in
significant energy savings and throughput is higher as
compared to Contention -based protocols.
Disadvantages- TRAMA has a higher delay than
contention - based protocols due to a higher percentage of
sleep time and thus is suitable for applications that are not
delay sensitive, but require high delivery throughput and
energy efficiency.
5) On- demand TDMA Scheduling for Energy
Conservation in Sensor Network: On-demand TDMA
scheduling (ODS) [11] represents two variants of TDMAbased MAC protocol, specifically designed for sensor
networks. They attempt to reduce energy consumption
while providing efficient delivery of sensor data to the
sinks. The two variants are Busy Tone On-Demand
Scheduling (BTODS) and On-Demand Scheduling (ODS).

a) Previously scheduled data

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Each node is assigned one time slot and the node has the
control over this time slot. A frame consists of several time
slots. After a frame length, a node again has a period of
time reserved for it. Time slots can be reused at a noninterfering distance. This time slots are assigned using a
distributed algorithm. During its assigned time slot, a node
can only transmit a message which consists of two parts:
control message and a data unit. As a time slot is
controlled by a single node, this node can communicate in a
collision free manner. The control message carries the ID
of the time slot controller, it indicates the distance of the
node to the gateway in hops for simple routing, it addresses
the intended receiver and reports the length of the data unit.
The control data will also be used to maintain
synchronization between the nodes. The nodes also
transmit the sequence number of their time slot in the
frame. All the neighboring nodes will put effort in
receiving the control messages of their neighboring nodes.
When a node is not addressed in that message the node will
switch off its power consuming transceivers only to wake
at the next time slot. If a node is addressed, it will listen to
the data unit which might not fill the entire remainder of
the time slot. Both transmitter and receiver(s) turn off their
transceivers after the message transfer has completed. In
this protocol, a node can only transmit a single message per
frame.
Advantages-Significant energy savings prolongs the
network lifetime. Nodes in the network can communicate
with each other in a collision free manner.
Disadvantages- The main drawback of LMAC scheme is
that it increases idle-listening overhead since nodes must
always listen to the control sections of all slots in a frame,
to allow nodes to receive data and to allow new nodes to
join the network anytime. As the slots are computed only
once in LMAC, this protocol is not suitable for mobile
sensor networks, where nodes can enter and leave other
nodes radio neighborhood at any time.
7) Self Organization and Energy Efficient TDMA MAC
Protocol by Wake Up: Self Organization and Energy
Efficient TDMA MAC Protocol by Wake Up (TDMA-W)
[14] is a self organizing TDMA based MAC protocol for
WSN with collision free communication and maintenance
simplicity. Time is divided into TDMA frames and each
TDMA frame is further divided into time slots. Each node
is assigned two slots in a TDMA frame. One is
Transmit/Send slot (s-slot) and the other is Wakeup slot (wslot). A node always listens to the channel during the w-slot
and transmits in the s-slot, if necessary.

b) Attempting to schedule data


Figure 8. Timing diagram for slots in BTODS [11]

a) Previously scheduled data

b) Attempting to schedule data


Figure 9. Timing diagram for slots in ODS [11]

Advantages- Both protocols are designed to schedule


sensor to sink flows while reducing energy consumption
due to collision, overhearing, idle listening and control
overhead. Both allow nodes to find slots which do not
interfere with existing flows in their vicinity.
Disadvantages- BTODS requires the hardware
capability to provide two non-interfering channels, either
by splitting a channel or using two separate radios. If the
channel is split, then the bit rate of the data channel may be
slightly reduced and the busy tone may be more susceptible
to the effects of fading [12]. For the latter case, twice as
much bandwidth is needed and energy will be consumed by
both radios. ODS requires longer time-slot and less time is
devoted to data transmission. This also has more control
overhead in terms of time and transmission.
6) Lightweight Medium Access Control Protocol:
Lightweight Medium Access Protocol (LMAC) [13] is an
energy-efficient TDMA-based MAC protocol designed for
wireless sensor network. It takes into account the physical
layer properties. The intention of the LMAC protocol is to
minimize the number of transceiver to make the sleep
interval of sensor nodes adaptive to the amount of data
traffic in the network.
In LMAC, time is divided into time slots, which nodes
can use to transfer data without having to content for the
medium. Thus it reduces energy wastage due to collisions.

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In this protocol, a sensor utilizes its assigned slot only
when it is sending or receiving information from other
nodes in the network, otherwise its receiver and transmitter
are turned off to avoid unnecessary neighbor listening
which consumes extra power. In order to avoid
overhearing, only destination nodes need to listen to the
transmitter. Other neighbors can turn-off their RF circuits
to save energy. To activate a node, the source node sends a
wakeup packet to the destination node in the w-slot
associated with the destination node. After receiving the
wakeup packet from source node, the destination node
identifies the source node and starts listening during the sslot associated with the source node.
Advantages- The power consumption of TDMA-W
protocol is only 1.5%-15% as much as SMAC. In other
words, the lifetime of TDMA-W networks is 6-67 times
longer than 10% S-MAC.
Disadvantages- The problem with this protocol is that
the slot assignment scheme sometimes cant detect one hop
collisions. Another problem that needs to be taken care of
is deadlock.
8) Flexible TDMA based MAC Protocol: Flexible
TDMA-based MAC Protocol (FlexiMAC) [15] is a novel
TDMA-based protocol for efficient data gathering in
wireless sensor networks that provides end-to-end
guarantees on data delivery. This protocol also takes into
account the severe energy and memory constraints of
wireless sensor networks and this is designed for periodic
data gathering application. In FlexiMAC, nodes only
transmit and receive packets during their own time slot(s)
then sleep until their slots turn up again. Initially,
FlexiMAC builds a data gathering tree and nodes'
schedules. This initial network setup is a one-off phase.
Once the schedule is built, nodes then maintain their
schedules throughout their lifetime in the network. During
the initial network setup, Flexi-MAC uses CSMA/CA for
packet transmission and so nodes' receivers are always on
(i.e., in the listen mode), and also uses a token passing
scheme. Nodes avoid collisions by allowing a node to
execute a specific procedure only when it holds a token.
After the initial network setup finishes, nodes perform
regular data gathering tasks using their TDMA schedules.
They also can modify their schedules when the network
topology changes means addition of new nodes or failure of
some nodes.
An example of look up table of nodes in Flexi-MAC is
shown in Figure 10. The schedule only represents a list of
slots when a node should be active and so the slots are not
contiguous in time (discrete).

Figure 10. FlexiMAC nodes' schedule (lookup table) [15]

In FlexiMAC, the Fault Tolerant-Listening Slot (FTS) is


simply a short CSMA period where all nodes in the
network are in the listen mode. The Base Station generates
a Time Slot Assignment token (TSA_token) and sends the
token to the nodes using DFS technique. This allows nodes
to claim a slot and allows them to adjust themselves
according to their local neighborhood state. Nodes switch
to the receive mode for their scheduled Receive Slot List
(RSL), transmit mode for scheduled Transmit Slot List
(TSL), or else they switch to the sleep mode. A MultiFunction Slot (MFS) is used for local time synchronization
and local repair. This helps the network to be fault tolerant.
The Conflict Slot List (CSL) which records slots that are
used by a node's first-level and second-level neighbors,
allows the slot to be reused in other nodes.
Advantages- As the nodes are active in only their TDMA
slots or else they sleep, resulting in high energy savings.
Nodes also can continue to perform properly irrespective of
the failure of individual nodes by performing a local repair
in FTS. So, this is fault tolerant, energy efficient and
guarantees end-to-end data delivery while achieving energy
and memory efficiency for different network configuration.
Disadvantages- FlexiMAC considers only energy &
memory constraints with end-to-end delivery guarantee.
But the end-to-end delay is one of the most important
parameters for wsn, is not considered for assessment. This
is the main problem with FlexiMAC.
9) Sensor Network TDMA Scheduling with Adaptive
Slot-stealing And Parallelism: Sensor Network TDMA
Scheduling with Adaptive Slot-stealing And Parallelism
(TDMA-ASAP) [16] is a modified TDMA protocol that
will allow for same efficiency of TDMA, while allowing
the network to conserve energy during times of low load.
This is an efficient MAC protocol that allows the network
to adapt to changing conditions and to balance end-to-end
transmission time and power consumption. This adds the
following techniques to TDMA: (a) the use of parallel
transmissions; (b) slot-stealing; and (c) adaptive sleeping
between transmissions.
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A conventional TDMA scheme will assign one time slot
to each sensor node. However, the sensors outside of each
others range can transmit simultaneously. There by slot
reuse is possible, that reduces the schedule length.
For WSN, the scheduling problem has two additional
constraints: (1) No child is to be scheduled after its parent
due to the use of data aggregation; and (2) Because of
possible collision at the receiver, nodes sending to a
common parent must be scheduled in different time slots,
although they might be outside each others range (hidden
nodes).
In the TDMA schedule each node is assigned a time slot
to transmit. In the case of a high trafc load each node will
transmit its data in its assigned slot, and hence, this
guarantees the minimum end-to-end delay. In case of light
trafc load, a technique called, slot stealing, is used on top
of the TDMA schedule. Every node is assigned a slot. The
node is called the owner of the slot. If the slot owner has no
data to send in its assigned slot, some other node can take
over this slot in a controlled way and send its data.
Advantages- TDMA-ASAP allows the network to adapt
to the changing conditions and to balance end-to-end
transmission time and energy consumption. It allows for
quick response time from sensor queries during bursts of
activity and conserves energy during periods of light load.
Disadvantages- The disadvantage of TDMA-ASAP is
that this assumes the sensor network to be lightly loaded.
10) Distributed TDMA Scheduling Protocol based on
Coloring Algorithm: Distributed TDMA Scheduling
Protocol based on Coloring Algorithm (TDMA-CA) [17] is
a distributed TDMA scheduling protocol which uses spatial
reuse of transmission channel.
Here the whole sensor network is defined to be a
spanning tree rooted at Access Point (AP). The tree is
represented by a graph G(V,E) where V is the set of nodes
in the network and E is the set of edges, namely the
communication link between nodes. The ID of the AP is 0.
A sample example of this protocol with eight nodes is
shown in Figure 11. Here, G represents the spanning tree of
the sensor network, G shows the collision among nodes
with a dashed line, GC represents the conflict graph, any
two nodes associated with the solid line are conflict.

Figure 11. Conflict graph [17]

Every data packet is forwarded by a node to its parent


and until it reaches the AP. TDMA-CA uses a distributed
coloring algorithm to allocate different colors to the
conflicting nodes (nodes within the 2-hop distance of a
node) and arranges distinct slots for data transmission for
each color by TDMA scheduling. Distributed Coloring
algorithm is divided into two stages. In first stage, each
node of graph G picks one slot for transmission in the
order of the traversal of the depth first search (DFS).
In the second stage, the DFS is repeated and now each node
picks as many of the remaining colors as it can for
transmission. At both stages, the nodes send this
information to their one-hop and two-hop neighbors in G'
so that all their interferers in GC learn about the
assignment. The result of both stages is shown in
Figure 12.

Figure 12. The result of both stages [17]

Advantages- This is conflict-free TDMA algorithm


which is energy efficient and has low latency.
Disadvantages- This protocol assumes strict time
synchronization among sensor nodes and the isomorphic
nature of sensor nodes.

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TABLE I
COMPARISON OF TDMA PROTOCOLS

BMA
MAC [3]

No

Average

Clustered

Dynamic

SOTP [4]

No

Less

Flat

Static

ED-TDMA
[5]

No

Clustered

Dynamic

Mobility
Tolerant
TDMA [6]
SMACS
[7]

No

Clustered

Dynamic

Flat

Static

Clustered

Dynamic

The nodes can use the allocated time-slots for data


transfer whenever required. TDMA has the natural
advantage of eliminating collision and bounding the delay,
thereby more energy-efficient. Nodes in the network can
conserve more energy by entering into inactive states when
they are not transmitting or receiving. This paper gives a
description of several TDMA-based MAC protocols both
centralized and distributed for the wireless sensor network.
Advantages and disadvantages of each protocol is
mentioned. A comparison study of different protocols
which are investigated in this paper is also given. Apart
from all the positive sides of TDMA, it has some
drawbacks too like limited scalability and adaptability to
network changes, strict time synchronization etc. With all
these positive and negative sides keeping in mind, future
research areas are trying to find a distributed energy
efficient standard MAC protocol suitable for wireless
sensor network.

Flat

Dynamic

[1]

Flat

Dynamic

Flat

Dynamic

Flat

Static

Flat

Static

Flat

Static

Flat

Dynamic

Flat

Static

List Of
Protocols

PACT [8]

Distributed

Delay

Topology

Schedule

Less

Yes
Yes
-

REFERENCES
DE-MAC
[9]

Yes

TRAMA
[10]

Yes

BTDOS /
ODS [11]

Yes

L-MAC
[13]

Yes

TDMA-W
[14]

Yes

FlexiMAC [15]

Yes

TDMAASAP [16]

Yes

TDMACA [17]

Yes

Akyildiz, I.F., Su, W., Sankarasubramaniam, Y. and Cayirci, E.


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Significant

Significant
(depends
on traffic
load)
Guaranteed
Minimum
end-to-end
delay
Significant
(depends
on traffic
load)

V. CONCLUSION
Wireless sensor networks are energy constraint and to
enhance the lifetime of the network an energy efficient
MAC protocol is required. TDMA-based MAC protocols
can be a solution which divides the time span into timeslots and allocate the slots to different nodes in a WSN.
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