Implementation of DRAND, the Distributed and Scalable TDMA Time Slot Scheduling Algorithm

Abstract

The problem of energy savings is the most important subject currently in the research area of wireless sensor networks. So, in order to present a better scheme for energy savings and system performance, the TDMA scheme is considered as a solution. Moreover, the TDMA time slot scheduling algorithm is an important issue in running the TDMA scheme. The distributed and scalable fashion is required in wireless sensor networks because it is very difficult and inefficient to manage many sensor nodes by the centralized method with small size of memory space and battery capacity on each sensor node deployed in the broad sensing field. So, we implemented DRAND, the TDMA time slot scheduling algorithm which supports the important requirements as we listed above. Even though a scheme shows good performance by the simulation result, the implementation as a real system is another problem to solve. This is because good simulation results could not guarantee that implementation of the algorithm would work properly in the real word due to various unexpected obstacles. Therefore, by implementing the DRAND scheme as a real system, we can confirm the analysis and simulation result with various real experiments. For the experiment, we use up to 42 MICA2 motes for one-hop and multi-hop test.