A TDMA-based protocol and implementation for avoiding inter-cluster interference of wireless sensor network

A time division multiple access (TDMA) scheduling protocol is proposed for solving the inter-cluster interference of medium access control (MAC) in cluster-based wireless sensor networks (WSN). Through each cluster-head snooping into the neighbor nodes´ networking packets and creating the TDMA schedule based on these packets, the protocol can avoid inter-cluster interference. The protocol is implemented in an assumed single-physical-channel network, thus its implementation does not depend on specific hardware, and has the advantage of generality. The implementation of the protocol is based on TinyOS software platform and MICA2 hardware platform. The generation of the cluster-heads, the networking cost, the networking packet loss rate and the accuracy of sensing data transmission are tested, and the results show that the protocol can avoid the inter-cluster interference and has moderate reliability.