Distributed degree-based link scheduling for collision avoidance in wireless sensor networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of multiple sensor nodes, which communicate with each other under the constrained energy resources. Retransmissions caused by collision and interference during the communication among sensor nodes increase overall network delay. Since the network delay increases as the node's waiting time increases, the network performance is reduced. Thus, the link scheduling scheme is needed to communicate without collision and interference. In the distributed WSNs environment, a sensor node has limited information about its neighboring nodes. Therefore, a comprehensive link scheduling scheme is required for distributed WSNs. Many schemes in the literature prevent collision and interference through time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol. However, considering the collision and interference in TDMA-based schedule increases the delay time and decreases the communication efficiency. This paper proposes the distributed degree-based link scheduling (DDLS) scheme, based on the TDMA. The DDLS scheme achieves the link scheduling more efficiently than the existing schemes and has the low delay and the duty cycle in the distributed environment. Communication between sensor nodes in the proposed DDLS schemes is based on collision avoidance maximal independent link set, which enables to assign collision-free timeslots to sensor nodes, and meanwhile decreases the number of timeslots needed and has low delay time and the duty cycle. Simulation results show that the proposed DDLS scheme reduces the scheduling length by average 81%, the transmission delay by 82%, and duty cycle by over 85% in comparison with distributed collision-free low-latency scheduling scheme.