A Tradeoff Between Power Efficiency and Scheduling Updating Responsiveness in a TDMA Paradigm

The design of an efficient medium access control (MAC) for wireless ad hoc networks or wireless sensor networks is challenging. These kinds of network can benefit from communication protocols that avoid frame collision: time division multiple access (TDMA). However, ad hoc networking and sensor networks enable novel communication paradigms which require the definition of new quality-of-service (QoS) parameters and frameworks for QoS support. The relevant QoS requirements are frequently antagonist and, consequently, an appropriate tradeoff has to be determined to fit all of them. In the distributed TDMA paradigm the speed of schedule exchange is important to have updated information about collision-free slots when the topology network changes. The high speed of the schedule update is paid in terms of power consumption. In this work, an analytical framework allowing an evaluation of the tradeoff between energy efficiency and responsiveness in the update process in a generic, distributed TDMA system is derived. The main objective of this work is to maximize the probability that the schedule updating process is realized in an interval time [0, t], given a constraint in terms of power consumption.