TRASA: TRaffic Aware Slot Assignment Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: In data gathering applications which is a typical application paradigm in wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes may have different traffic demands. Assigning equal channel access to each node may lead to congestion, inefficient use of the bandwidth and decrease of the application performance. In this paper, we prove that the time slot assignment problem is NP-complete when p-hop nodes are not assigned the same slot, with 1 <= p <= h for any strictly positive integer h. We propose TRASA, a TRaffic Aware time Slot Assignment algorithm able to allocate slots to sensors proportionally to their demand. We evaluate the performance of TRASA for different heuristics and prove that it provides an optimized spatial reuse and a minimized cycle length.