A real-time MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks: Virtual TDMA for Sensors (VTS)

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are designed for data gathering and processing, with particular requirements and constraints: low hardware complexity, low energy consumption, special traffic pattern support, scalability, and in some cases, real-time operation. In this paper we present the Virtual TDMA for Sensors (VTS) MAC protocol, which intends to support the previous features, focusing particularly on real-time operation. VTS adaptively creates a TDMA arrangement with a number of timeslots equal to the actual number of nodes in range. Thus, VTS achieves an optimal throughput performance compared to TDMA protocols with fixed size of frame. The TDMA frame is set up and maintained by a distributed procedure, which allows sensors to asynchronously join and leave the frame. A major advantage of VTS is that it guarantees a bounded latency, which allows soft real-time applications. An expression for the upper latency bound is also provided in this paper. VTS performance is evaluated by simulation. Results show less power consumption than other proposals in the field. We also introduce a novel multi-hop operation by coordinated sleep/awake cycles among clusters. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.