Self-organizing TDMA for multihop networks

We present a preliminary study of self-organizing TDMA for battery-constrained multihop wireless networks, such as sensor networks. Compared with existing TDMA approaches, this work emphasizes operation in the context of battery saving techniques that allow the radio to spend most of its time powered down, relying on some rendezvous mechanism to ensure that sender and receiver are simultaneously powered on and able to communicate. While such techniques reduce battery consumption, they also significantly limit the amount of information — even local information — that nodes can obtain from channel sensing or packet exchange. We therefore focus on self-organizing TDMA in the case of very limited state information. This work is also relevant to the practical case of independent, co-located sensor networks, which need to adapt to each other's presence without explicit coordination.