A Classification Framework for TDMA Scheduling techniques in WSNs

One of the major challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is the mitigation of collisions due to simultaneous transmissions by multiple nodes over a common channel which are located in a proximity. TDMA-based channel access provides energy-efficient and collision-free transmissions. It is especially suitable for traffic with periodic transmission patterns and guaranteed QoS requirements. For that reason, a large number of TDMA-scheduling algorithms are available in the literature, and consequently, a good number of survey papers on TDMA-scheduling algorithms have been written. In this work, we propose a novel classification framework to categorize the existing TDMA-scheduling algorithms available for WSNs. As against existing survey works, the proposed framework possess certain new dimensions (categories) to classify existing TDMA-scheduling algorithms. Additionally, we introduce a couple of new sub-categories for the existing classes which would help researchers to even differentiate between two TDMA-Scheduling algorithms that are assumed to be similar as per existing classification schemes. Finally, we also discuss few important works in the context of proposed classification scheme.