A cross-layer distributed TDMA scheduling for data gathering with minimum latency in wireless sensor networks

In a wireless sensor network, given a routing tree for data gathering from individual nodes to the sink node, this paper presents a simple, distributed algorithm for assigning time slot to each node for conflict-free communication, such that the maximum latency in data gathering at the sink is minimized. It requires just a one-time computation during the initialisation of the network provided the nodes remain static. Simulation studies have been done to evaluate the performance in terms of latency, and the average duty cycle.