A cyclic MAC scheduler for collecting data from heterogeneous sensors

Chun-Yu Lin
a,
, Chen-Lung Chan
b
, Chung-Ta King
a
, Huang-Chen Lee
b
a
Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
b
Computer and Communication Research Center, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 27 November 2009
Received in revised form 27 February 2011
Accepted 28 February 2011
Available online 5 March 2011
Keywords:
Wireless sensor networks
Data collecting system
Time division multiple access
Cyclic schedule
Distance constrained task set
a b s t r a c t
Many wireless sensor networks applications, e.g., structural health monitoring (SHM), require the sensors
to construct a multihop network to collect the environmental data in real-time. These sensors generally
generate sensing data in xed rates, so their transmission schedules can be deterministically listed. Time
division multiple access (TDMA) is especially appropriate for these applications because it can prevent
radio interference, thereby reducing the transmission power and maximizing wireless spectrum reuse.
However, to reserve sufcient bandwidths on distinct links of a heterogeneous WSN, a complex TDMA
schedule is necessary, and a sensor node might need to keep a large TDMA schedule table in its tiny mem-
ory. To prevent a large size TDMA schedule table, this paper proposes a CyclicMAC scheduler that assigns
each node a temporal transmission pattern which is merely parameterized by period and phase. The
CyclicMAC scheduler determines the period to satisfy the bandwidth requirement of the node, and
adjusts the phase to achieve collision-freeness and reduce the end-to-end latency as well. The end-
to-end latency of the resulting schedule is proven to be optimal if the wireless links only interfere with
their parent link and sibling links. As far as we know, CyclicMAC is the rst that simultaneously addresses
the three design issues of TDMA scheduling, which satises heterogeneous bandwidth requirements,
minimizing schedule table size, and reducing end-to-end latency, for multihop wireless sensor networks.
2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Structural health monitoring (SHM) refers to a collection of tech-
nologies that monitor and diagnose the health state of an architec-
tural structure in real-time. Typically, heterogeneous sensors are
deployed inside and around the structure to periodically collect
various types of data relevant to the health state. For example,
to monitor a bridge, engineers must deploy sensors such as
accelerometers, strain gauges, displacement transducers, level
sensing stations, anemometers, temperature sensors and dynamic
weight-in-motion sensors. These sensors measure everything from
tarmac temperature, wind speed, deection and rotation of cables,
and movement of the bridges desks. Different measurements have
different characteristics and need to be sampled and reported at
different rates, e.g., temperature may be reported once every few
minutes, while vibration and movement may need to be reported
several hundred times per second. Since most existing SHM
systems rely on wired sensors, the cost of deployment and mainte-
nance is usually very high. The massive advances in the develop-
ment of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in recent years offer new
opportunities to the SHM applications. Wireless communication
eliminates the cost of deploying wires and increases the scalability
of the SHM systems.
Wireless sensor nodes are usually powered by batteries. Short-
range communication is more appropriate for transmitting sensed
data because it requires less energy than long-range communica-
tion. It also enables spatial reuse of the radio spectrum, and there-
by increases the throughput of network. For these reasons, sensors
usually use multihop transmission, which utilizes a series of short-
range communication links to send data back to the control center,
called a sink. In WSN applications, the multihop networks are
usually built based on either CSMA or TDMA MAC protocols. In
CSMA-based protocols, such as S-MAC [1] and T-MAC [2], when a
sensor node needs to transmit a data packet, it and the other sen-
sor nodes in the same network exchange messages or use Clear
Channel Assessment (CCA) hardware components to grant the
right to access the channel and prevent the packet collision. But
in TDMA-based protocols, the sensor nodes transmit data packets
according to a predened schedule that will never cause the packet
collision. In general, a CSMA-based protocol is suitable for a dy-
namic environment in which the wireless links between the sensor
nodes are easily broken or the sensor nodes will generate data in
unstable rates. However, such overhead on energy consumption
is unnecessary if the system environment is relatively stable. For
0140-3664/$ - see front matter 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2011.02.012

Corresponding author at: Room 734, EECS Building, No. 101, Section 2, Kuang-
Fu Road, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan. Tel.: +886 3 5715131x33906; fax: +886 3
5723694.
E-mail addresses: chunyu@cs.nthu.edu.tw (C.-Y. Lin), clchan@mx.nthu.edu.tw
(C.-L. Chan), king@cs.nthu.edu.tw (C.-T. King), huclee@mx.nthu.edu.tw (H.-C. Lee).
Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644
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example, in most SHM applications, each sensor node is mounted
on the structures and transmits sensed data regularly. Such stable
system characters lead to a static network topology and static data
rates that are appropriate to the TDMA-based protocols.
Consider a wireless sensor network with a set of sensor nodes.
We assume that a pair of sensor nodes has a wireless link if they
are in the radio range of each other. If a group of nodes are in range
of each other, their data packets will collide if these packets are
transmitted simultaneously. To prevent the potential radio inter-
ference, the transmissions of these wireless links must be stag-
gered into different times. In a TDMA-based MAC protocol, the
TDMA scheduler determines the times to transmit packets of each
wireless link to prevent radio interference. Assuming the timeline
is slotted, the TDMA scheduler assigns each wireless link a series of
timeslots on which it can transmit the data packets. The assign-
ments are stored in the TDMA schedule tables of the two sensor
nodes connected by the wireless link. The sensor nodes can thus
turn on/off their radio interfaces according to their TDMA sched-
ules to save energy. Due to its simplicity and efciency on energy
consumption, TDMA-based protocols have been widely applied in
many WSN applications.
However, when applying TDMA to a multihop wireless sensor
network that supports real-time SHM applications, the TDMA
scheduler should further take the following three practical design
issues into account:
Satisfying bandwidth requirement: The available bandwidth of a
wireless link is determined by the number of transmission
timeslots allocated to the link, and the bandwidth should be
sufciently large to not only transmit the data packets gener-
ated by the sensor nodes connected by the link but also relay
the trafc from the upstream links. Thus, the TDMA scheduler
should assign sufcient timeslots to each link according to its
aggregated bandwidth requirement so that all the sensed/
relayed data packets can be collected in time.
Minimizing TDMA schedule table: The TDMA schedule table spec-
ies when the wireless links will be activated in a given period.
The sensor node must store the TDMA schedule in its main
memory, which is a resource as scarce as the battery power.
Therefore, the TDMA schedule should be compact enough so
that the remaining memory space can be used by other critical
tasks, such as queuing the sensing data.
Reducing the end-to-end latency: When using WSN in an emer-
gency application, the underlying wireless network should have
similar performance as a wired network, i.e., data packets
should be delivered to the sink immediately after they are
generated. Note that in a multihop wireless network, the end-
to-end latency of a data packet will be increased if the transmis-
sion of the packet is interrupted to wait for the active timeslot
of an intermediate wireless link. Thus, to reduce the end-to-end
latency, the TDMA scheduler must arrange the transmission
timeslots of this packet link by link along the end-to-end path
to ensure the timeslots are consecutive.
Many previous works have addressed some of these design is-
sues of TDMA scheduling for wireless sensor networks. However,
to the best of our knowledge, none of these works fullls all the
above three issues simultaneously. Some TDMA schedulers [48]
take the bandwidth requirement into account by allocating each
sensor node a contiguous timeslot whose length is proportionally
fair to its bandwidth requirement. However, such design does
not consider the consecutiveness of the allocated timeslots along
the end-to-end path from a sensor to the sink, and therefore could
lead to a considerable end-to-end latency of transmitting a data
packet. The EDF-based TDMA schedulers [911] enumerate every
intending packet transmission and schedule the transmissions
based on Earliest Deadline First policy to reduce the end-to-end
latency. These approaches consider both different bandwidth
requirements and low end-to-end transmission latency. However,
the TDMA schedule tables in these approaches must include the
enumeration of all the packet transmissions, so these approaches
tend to generate a huge schedule table when the sensor nodes have
deviated sensing rates, or when the network size is large. The
resulting TDMA schedule table might be too enormous for sensor
nodes to store in their tiny memory. Some TDMA schedulers
[12,1519] generate a round-robin TDMA schedule table, which
is simple and small. However, these TDMA schedulers do not con-
sider the different bandwidth requirements of the sensor nodes
and the end-to-end latency in a data collecting system.
In this paper, we propose a TDMA scheduler called CyclicMAC
that fullls all the above design issues in multihop wireless sensor
networks. CyclicMAC scheduler species a cyclic link schedule
parameterized only by period and phase for each wireless link,
where the period is the time interval between two consecutive
packet transmissions and the phase is the initial delay time to
transmit the rst packet. Undoubtedly, the size of the TDMA sche-
dule table in CyclicMAC can be effectively reduced since it only
needs to store two parameters for each wireless link, instead of
the timetable of each individual packet transmission. The band-
width requirement of a wireless link can be satised by setting
an appropriate period, and the end-to-end latency of a data packet
can be minimized by adjusting the phase. We also prove that in an
ideal case in which the wireless links only interfere with their par-
ent links and sibling links, CyclicMAC scheduler will generate a
TDMA schedule with an optimal end-to-end latency, i.e., the time-
slot length multiplies the number of intermediate links from
source node to sink. Such ideal case is reasonable in a sparsely de-
ployed wireless sensor network. We also prove that in a densely
deployed network, the end-to-end latency is still bounded. There-
fore, CyclicMAC is considered to be an ideal MAC scheduler to WSN
applications whose data sampling rates are static.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
lists the previous works related to our research. In Section 3, we
formally describe the system model of TDMA over a multihop
wireless sensor network. Section 3.1 introduces the proposed
CyclicMAC scheduler. In Section 5, we present some performance
evaluations of the proposed scheduler via simulation. Section 6
gives some concluding remarks.
2. Related works
In this paper, we focus on the design of a TDMA scheduler that
generates a small TDMA schedule to support both the bandwidth
requirement and latency minimization for a data collecting system
over a multihop wireless sensor network. While some famous
works, such as B-MAC [1] T-MAC [2], Dozer [3], target at support-
ing general purpose WSN applications which might be highly
dynamic, we only target at the data collection system whose
network condition is stable, rather than dynamic.
Some previous works [48] propose TDMA schedulers that sup-
port the bandwidth requirements by achieving the fairness of
bandwidth allocation. Sridharan and Krishnamachari [4] proposed
a method that determines the number of time slots allocated to the
sensor nodes proportionally according to their bandwidth require-
ments. Wang et al. [5], Zheng et al. [7], and Rajendran et al. [8] de-
ne the timeslot allocation as an optimization problem that
maximizes the throughput. Soldati et al. [6] further denes an opti-
mization problem that considers the end-to-end bandwidth alloca-
tion over a multihop network. In general, these TDMA schedulers
allocate timeslots for the sensor nodes according to their sampling
rates to ensure bandwidth fairness among the nodes. These
C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644 1631
schedulers usually allocate some consecutive timeslots to each
node according to its bandwidth requirement. However, such con-
secutive allocation could easily induce additional transmission la-
tency in a multihop wireless sensor network. In a multihop
wireless sensor network, a data packet is transmitted by the source
sensor node, relayed by several intermediate sensor nodes, and
then delivered to the sink. If the timeslot allocation does not con-
sider the order of packet transmission carefully, the data packet
might need to be queued in an intermediate node because the cur-
rent timeslot has been allocated to another neighbor node. This
undoubtedly lengthens the end-to-end latency, and once the queue
has overowed, the packets will be dropped and therefore cause
packet loss.
A TDMA scheduler that only considers the bandwidth require-
ment is insufcient. In a static data collecting system such as a
SHM application, the sensor nodes usually sample the environ-
ment and transmit the sample data to the sink at regular rates.
Therefore, the TDMA scheduler can deterministically enumerate
all the packet transmissions in a given time interval and then sche-
dule the packet transmission times to satisfy various designated
goals, such as real-time [911]. For example, both Li et al. [9]
and Stankovic et al. [10] schedule packet transmissions, in a multi-
ple hop and a single hop network respectively, via the Earliest-
Deadline-First (EDF) scheduling algorithm, which has been proven
effective in both satisfying bandwidth requirements and reducing
end-to-end latency [12]. Chipara et al. [11] schedules the transmis-
sions of the messages responding to a specic query with deadline,
in a multiple hop wireless sensor network. However, in a network
consisting of many sensor nodes with heterogeneous sampling
rates, enumerating the packet transmissions requires both inten-
sive computation and memory overhead. Even if the scheduler is
executed on a powerful server to eliminate the computation over-
head on the sensor nodes, it still has to announce a huge schedule
table to the entire network. Undoubtedly, to broadcast such a large
schedule table to a multihop wireless sensor network requires con-
siderable energy consumption on the sensor nodes. Besides, to
keep this schedule table in the wireless sensor network requires
the sensor nodes to allocate an excessive amount of memory for
storage, which might not be feasible for resource constrained sen-
sor nodes.
An interesting approach to reduce the size of TDMA schedule ta-
bles is to let the wireless links transmit data packets in a round-ro-
bin schedule [1319]. These works assume that the system
execution timeline is equally divided into many periods, with each
period being composed of a set of equally-sized timeslots with
identiers. Then, a round-robin scheduler allocates each node a
timeslot ID that indicates the node can periodically be active to
transmit data at that timeslot in each period. By the round-robin
schedule, each sensor node could only use the timeslot id and total
timeslot number to determine the activation of its wireless link so
that the sensor nodes could keep a small schedule table. DMAC
[13] further staggers the activation of sensor nodes to reduce the
end-to-end latency. Mao et al. [15] proposes a TDMA scheme
which employs machine learning model to nd the time-optimal
solution for such staggered TDMA schedule. Song et al. [16] ana-
lyzes the time-optimality of such staggered schedule in typical tree
routing structure. Some of these previous works [1719] employ
the graph coloring algorithm to determine the order of transmis-
sion timeslots of wireless links. The coloring algorithm also allows
spatial reusability when scheduling the transmissions of a multi-
hop wireless network, thus improving the throughput of the net-
work. Li et al. [17] provides a general coloring model for
scheduling the transmissions, and extends the model to consider
the transmission latency in multihop network. Gandham et al.
[18] devises a distributed coloring algorithm for link scheduling.
Lu et al. [19] analysis delay efciency of a coloring based sleep
scheduling algorithm. However, these round-robin-based TDMA
schedulers basically assign the bandwidth evenly to the adjacent
wireless links according to the network topology. When the sensor
nodes have heterogeneous bandwidth requirements, such even
bandwidth allocation could allocate too many timeslots to low
data rate wireless links but insufcient timeslots to high data rate
wireless links. If the network is single hop, previous work proposed
by Carley et al. [20] could be a good reference to solve such band-
width allocation problems. In their work, a contention-free peri-
odic message scheduler is proposed to support heterogeneous
bandwidth allocation by giving each wireless link a cyclic schedule
that is parameterized by a period and a phase. However, their
scheduling algorithm can only be applied in single hop networks,
so it still cannot benet data collecting systems generally imple-
mented over multihop networks. However, the idea behind this
previous work is interesting, and this triggers our work on devel-
oping CyclicMAC, which extends the concept of cyclic scheduling
to support multihop wireless sensor networks.
3. System models
In this section, we formulate the system model of a WSN-based
data collecting system. We assume the topology of the data collect-
ing system is static and consists of total m wireless sensor nodes
N = {n
0
, n
1
, . . . , n
m
} to collect sampling data. Among the sensor
nodes, n
0
is the sink, and it collects the sampling data from the
other sensor nodes {n
1
, n
2
, . . . , n
m
}. To address the heterogeneity,
each sensor node has its own designated sampling rate. Let
S = {s
1
, s
2
, . . . , s
i
, . . . , s
m
} denote the sampling rates of the sensor
nodes, where s
i
indicates the sampling rate of the sensor node n
i
.
A data collecting tree E = {e
1
, e
2
, . . . , e
i
, . . . , e
m
} is a collection of wire-
less links rooted on n
0
, where the routing structure of E is assumed
to be a given parameter, which is determined based on the appli-
cation requirements, such as energy efciency, latency efciency
or load balance. Each wireless link e
i
is a directional link whose
source node is n
i
and destination node is the parent node of n
i
in
the data collecting tree E. Since the data collecting tree denes
the precedence relationships among links when they collect sam-
pling data, we can say that each link has a parent link and a set
of child links. That is, Parent
i
denotes the next link of e
i
to the sink
in E, while Children
i
denotes the preceding links whose destination
nodes are n
i
. Fig. 1 illustrates a data collecting system. {n
0
, n
1
, n
2
,
n
3
, n
4
, n
5
, n
6
} are the sensor nodes that collect structure health data.
They form a data collecting tree, illustrated in solid links, to deliver
their sample data to the sink node n
0
. As mentioned, the data col-
lecting tree also denes the precedence relationship of the wireless
links. Take e
4
in Fig. 1 as an example; thus Children
4
is {e
3
, e
2
} and
both Parent
3
and Parent
2
are e
4
.
In a wireless network, two wireless links cannot be scheduled
for transmission at the same time if their radio interfaces interfere
with each other. In Fig. 1, the dashed lines illustrate the interfer-
ence between two wireless links. To represent this schedule con-
straint, an interference graph I is introduced to represent the
interference between the wireless links. The vertices of I indicate
the wireless links of E, e.g., the vertex e
1
in I is the wireless link
e
1
in E. If e
i
and e
j
interfere with each other, there will be an edge
between them. The interference graph I can be represented as a
m m matrix I = {I
ij
j I
ij
= 1 if e
i
and e
j
interfere with each other;
otherwise, I
ij
= 0}.
Fig. 2 shows the corresponding interference graph of the exem-
plary network in Fig. 1. The interference graph I can be built using
the theoretical [21,22] or empirical interfering model [23,24].
Maheshwari et al. [25] study the impact of interference estimation
algorithms by evaluating packet reception rate under various
levels of radio interference. They especially compare the packet
1632 C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644
reception rates of a TDMA MAC under several famous interference
estimation models. Their work is helpful for the readers to under-
stand the practical issues in details.
3.1. TDMA scheduling model and constraints
Based on the above model, the TDMA scheduler still needs to
determine the active times of the wireless links in E. Let the system
execution timeline be divided into a set of timeslots numbered
incrementally from 0. The length of a timeslot t
k
is the time re-
quired to transmit a single sample packet completely. The TDMA
schedule can then be represented as a mapping function f(t
k
, e
i
) 2
{0, 1}, where each f(t
k
, e
i
) determines the state of a wireless link e
i
in a specic timeslot t
k
. That is, f(t
k
, e
i
) = 1 indicates that e
i
can be
active to transmit data from n
i
to its parent at time t
k
, while
f(t
k
, e
i
) = 0 indicates the e
i
is silent.
A feasible TDMA schedule for a static data collecting system
should satisfy the two requirements below:
Collision-free requirement: The TDMA schedule should stagger
the packet transmission times of interfering wireless links.
Bandwidth requirement: The TDMA schedule should allocate suf-
cient timeslots to each wireless link according to its aggre-
gated bandwidth requirement.
A TDMA schedule is said to be collision free if no two interfering
wireless links are active at the same time. The collision-free
requirement is formally dened as below, given any timeslot t
k
:
8e
i
; e
j
2 E and I
ij
1; f t
k
; e
i
f t
k
; e
j
5 1: 1
Furthermore, a wireless link might deliver the data packets gener-
ated by the source node of the link or forwarded from the children
links. The TDMA schedule should allocate sufcient timeslots to
each wireless link in order to ensure the wireless link has sufcient
bandwidth to deliver these data packets. Formally, given a period T
and the TDMA schedule of a wireless link e
i
, the bandwidth require-
ment is formulated as below:

T
0
t
k
0
f t
k
; e
i
PT s
i

e
j
2Children
i

T
t
k
0
f t
k
; e
j
; 2
where s
i
is the sampling rate of n
i
, and Ts
i
is the total number of
data packets generated by n
i
. The left hand side of Eq. (2) is the total
timeslots that e
i
owns to transmit data during T, and the right hand
side is the sum of the total data that e
i
receives from its children
links and itself. Note that to keep the discussion clear, we default
assume that one packet contains one sample data (i.e., without data
aggregation) and the packet size equals to the maximum sample
size. Therefore, the length of a timeslot will be equal to the time re-
quired to completely transmit a single packet. Of course, Eq. (2) can
also be applied in the scenario where one data packet contains more
Fig. 1. An example of a WSN-based data collecting system.
e
2
e
3
e
4
e
5
e
6
e
1
Fig. 2. The interference graph of the network in Fig. 1.
C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644 1633
than two samples by adjusting the sampling rate, if the samples can
be tted into a packet. But if the required packet size increases (e.g.,
the maximum sample size increases), the system must be resched-
uled. However, this exception should rarely happen in a static WSN.
3.2. Problems of timetable-based implementation
In a static data collecting system, the sensor nodes generate the
sensing data in static sampling rates. Therefore, the aggregated
transmission pattern will repeat in every hyper-period, which
is the least common multiple of all the sensor nodes sampling
periods. For such a static system, a TDMA schedule can be imple-
mented via a timetable that species the transmission timeslots
of each wireless link during a hyper-period. The timetable is then
distributed to all the sensor nodes, and a sensor node will follow
the TDMA sub-schedules of the wireless links connected to it to
transmit its data packets. After the current hyper-period is n-
ished, the sensor node will re-execute the schedule.
Although the timetable-based approach is easy to implement, it
intends to construct a huge schedule table. We illustrate such a
problem by estimating the space complexity of the timetable. Con-
sider a data collecting system with n sensor nodes. Assume that a
data packet generated by a sensor node n
i
is relayed by h
i
number
of wireless links, i.e., total h
i
number of packet transmissions will
be generated. In addition, the hyper-period T is the least common
multiple of all the sensor nodes sampling periods. During each hy-
per-period T, the sensor node will generate Ts
i
data packets be-
cause its sampling rate is s
i
. Therefore, in a TDMA schedule table,
the number of the timetable entries for the wireless link e
i
will
be h
i
T s
i
. Based on the above, the number of the entries in the
complete TDMA schedule table will be

n
i1
h
i
T s
i
. Furthermore,
the hyper-period T intends to be large in a data collecting system
with heterogeneous sensor nodes because the sampling rates of
the sensor nodes are deviated. In the worst case, T might be as large
as the production of all the sampling periods, and such a large hy-
per-period will undoubtedly lead to a large TDMA schedule table.
As we mentioned above, a huge TDMA schedule table will occu-
py considerable memory space, which might not be affordable in
resource limited sensor nodes. Besides, to broadcast such a huge
TDMA schedule table to the entire network will cause a lot of en-
ergy consumption on the sensor nodes. Due to the above two dis-
advantages, a timetable-based TDMA scheduler is considered to be
less efcient for a resource-limited WSN.
4. CyclicMAC: collision free cyclic TDMA scheduler
To minimize the size of the TDMA schedule table, in this paper
we propose a TDMA scheduler that species a cyclic schedule to
each wireless link of a given data collecting tree. A cyclic schedule
is parameterized by a period, which is the time interval between
two consecutive transmissions, and a phase, which is the initial
delay time of the rst transmission. This kind of TDMA schedule re-
quires a tiny memory space because only two parameters are
needed to be stored. Broadcasting such a small TDMA schedule
to the entire network also requires much less energy consumption
than broadcasting a timetable-based TDMA schedule. Note that the
concept of cyclic schedule is introduced by Carley et al. [20], but
the scheduler they proposed can only be applied to single hop net-
works. This paper adapts such a concept and proposes a new cyclic
scheduler that not only supports multihop wireless networks but
also takes the bandwidth and the end-to-end latency requirements
into account.
4.1. Cyclic TDMA scheduling problem
To simplify the notations, we let the schedule that species the
transmission timeslots of a wireless link be referred to as a cyclic
linkschedule, andwe let theaggregationof thecyclic linkschedules
of the entire network be referred to as a cyclic TDMA schedule.
More specically, let q
i
and /
i
be the period and the phase of a wire-
less link e
i
s cyclic link schedule, respectively. That is, e
i
will initially
pause for /
i
timeslots and then periodically transmit a data packet
every q
i
timeslots. Fig. 3 shows an example of a data collecting tree
that uses a cyclic TDMA schedule for data transmissions. In this
example, the cyclic link schedule of wireless link e
2
is hq
2
, /
2
i =
h6, 4i; hence, e
2
will transmit data at timeslots {4, 10, 16, . . .}. Simi-
larly, e
3
will transmit data at timeslots {9, 19, 29, . . .} and e
4
will
transmit data at timeslots {3, 13, 23, 33, . . .}. Formally, assuming
the timeslots are numbered incrementally fromzero, the cyclic link
schedule of a wireless link e
j
is dened as below:
f t
i
; e
j

1 ift
i
/
i
%q
i
0;
0; otherwise:
_
3
The previous section has demonstrated that the TDMA schedule for
a data collecting system based on WSN should fulll both collision-
free and bandwidth requirements. Eq. (1) illustrates the condition
of the collision-free requirement for a TDMA schedule. We extend
Eq. (1) to derive the condition that a collision-free cyclic TDMA
schedule must satisfy. Let e
i
and e
j
be two wireless links that inter-
fere with each other, i.e., I
ij
= 1. A TDMA schedule will lead them to
actually collide with each other if f(t
k
, e
i
) + f(t
k
, e
j
) > 1 at a certain
timeslot t
k
, i.e., both their cyclic link schedules allocate timeslot t
k
to transmit the data packet. This collision condition can be formu-
lated as below:
/
i
g q
i
t
k
;
/
j
h q
j
t
k
;
_
where both g and h are non-zero positive integers. The formulation
can be reduced as follows:
/
i
g q
i
/
j
h q
j
;
) /
i
/
j
h q
j
g q
i
:
n
1
n
2
n
3
n
4
(6, 4)
(10,9) (10, 3)
e
2
e
3
e
4
0 1 2 3 4 5
e
3
e
4
e
2
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
2
3
4

2
16

4
Fig. 3. An example of a cyclic TDMA schedule.
1634 C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644
Moreover, let gcd (q
i
, q
j
) be the greatest common divider of q
i
and
q
j
. Hence, let u
q
i
gcdq
i
;q
j

and z
q
j
gcdq
i
;q
j

, and then the above equa-

tion can be simplied as below:
/
i
/
j
h u gcdq
i
; q
j
g z gcdq
i
; q
j
:
Let another non-zero positive integer k represent h u g z, and
the above equation can be reduced as below:
/
i
/
j
k gcdq
i
; q
j
for k h u g z: 4
Eq. (4) shows that the cyclic schedules of e
i
and e
j
, i.e., hq
i
, /
i
i and
hq
j
, /
j
i, will use the same timeslot to cause a collision if we can nd
a certain non-zero positive integer k that makes the Eq. (4) be true.
Hence, let L = {hq
1
, /
1
i, hq
2
, /
2
i, . . ., hq
i
, /
i
i, . . . , hq
m
, /
m
i} be a cyclic
TDMA schedule, where m is the number of sensor nodes. L will
not lead each pair of interfering wireless links to actually interfere
with each other if the below condition is true:
8e
i
; e
j
2 E&I
ij
1; /
i
/
j
k gcdq
i
; q
j
for all integer k;
5
In addition to the collision-free requirement, the cyclic TDMA
schedule should also satisfy the bandwidth requirement that is
formulated by Eq. (2). A cyclic TDMA schedule should allocate suf-
cient timeslots in each link according to its bandwidth require-
ment. Let T be an arbitrary time period. The number of timeslots
in which a wireless link e
i
will transmit data is
T
q
i
_ _
. Then the band-
width requirement can be formulated as

T
t
k
0
f t
k
; e
i

T
q
i
_ _
; 6
where q
i
is the period of the wireless link e
i
. In other words, q
i
determines the bandwidth allocated to the wireless link e
i
and it
should satisfy e
i
s bandwidth requirement. Eq. (2) can be reduced
by substituting

T
t
k
0
f t
k
; e
i
with
T
q
i
_ _
:

T
t
k
0
f t
k
; e
i
PT s
i

e
j
2Children
i

T
t
k
0
f t
k
; e
j

)
T
q
i
_ _
PT s
i

e
j
2Children
i
T
q
j
_ _
)
1
q
i
_ _
Ps
i

e
j
2Children
i
1
q
j
_ _
:
Finally, we can derive that the cyclic TDMA schedule L can ensure
each wireless link satises the bandwidth requirement if the below
condition is true:
8e
i
2 E; q
i
6
1
s
i

e
j
2Children
i
1
q
j
: 7
Hence, we dene a TDMA scheduling problem as below:
Collision-free cyclic link scheduling for data collecting: Given a data
collecting system consisting of:
m sensor nodes N = {n
1
, n
2
, . . . , n
m
} with sampling rates S = {s
1
,
s
2
, . . . , s
m
}, and
a data collecting tree E = {e
1
, e
2
, . . . , e
m
} with interference graph I
determine a cyclic TDMA schedule L = {hq
1
, /
1
i, hq
2
, /
2
i, . . .,
hq
i
, /
i
i, . . . hq
m
, /
m
i}, in which q
i
and q
i
are the period and the
phase of a wireless link e
0
i
s cyclic link schedule, that satises the
below two conditions:
8e
i
; e
j
2 E&I
ij
1; /
i
/
j
k gcdq
i
; q
j
for all integer k
8e
i
2 E; q
i
6
1
s
i

e
j
2Children
i
1
q
j
4.2. CyclicMAC scheduler
In this subsection, a cyclic TDMA scheduler, called CyclicMAC, is
introduced to solve the problem ofcollision-free cyclic link scheduling
for data collecting. CyclicMAC generates a cyclic TDMA schedule
that consists of a set of cyclic link schedules for the wireless links
in the data collecting tree. The CyclicMAC scheduler works in two
stages: (1) period determination, and (2) phase determination. In
the period determination stage, CyclicMAC determines the periods
of the wireless links cyclic link schedule according to their band-
width requirements. That is, the bandwidth of each wireless link
cannot be smaller than the summation of its sampling data rate
and the bandwidth requirements of its children wireless links, as
Eq. (7) describes. CyclicMAC scheduler traverses the data collecting
tree from leaves to root and initiates each wireless link a cyclic link
schedule whose period satises the bandwidth requirement. Let L

be the resulting cyclic TDMA schedule, and let hq

i
; /

i
i be the cyclic
link schedule for a wireless link e
i
after the period determination,
while /

i
is set to zero initially. In the phase determination stage,
the CyclicMAC scheduler rst sorts all the cyclic link schedules
(i.e., hq

i
; /

i
i ) in L

by the order of the period lengths (i.e., q

i
)
and then determines the phase of each hq

i
; /

j
i that does not violate
the collision-free requirement as Eq. (5) depicts.
Finding the phases that make L

collision-free is not trivial. The

rst reason is that such collision-free phases might not exist at all.
Recall that Eq. (5) describes the collision-free requirements of the
wireless links. If gcdq

i
; q

j
1 , no matter which values of the
phases /
i
and /
j
are selected, we can always nd an integer k that
lets wireless links e
i
and e
j
be active in the same timeslot. There-
fore, if e
i
and e
j
interfere with each other, their packets will
undoubtedly collide in this case. The second reason is that the
search space of nding collision-free phases for L

could be enor-
mous. Consider L

as set of periodic tasks that periodically perform

transmission jobs; then the period of a cyclic link schedule is re-
ferred to as the period of a periodic task. If we let L

be referred to
as a set of periodic tasks whose phases are not determined yet, pre-
vious work [20] in real-time systems has concluded that the num-
ber of possible phase assignments for L

will be

m
i1
q

i
, which is
exponential.
In this paper, we employ the Distance Constraint scheduler (DCS)
[26] to derive a collision-free phase assignment. The Distance Con-
straint scheduler (DCS) targets the real-time scheduling problem
named Distance Constraint Task System (DCTS). A DCTS refers to
a set of periodic tasks that contend for CPU resources, and each
of these tasks should be executed periodically in a xed interval.
The xed interval that each task periodically executes is called
the distance constraint of the task. By conclusion of [26], a DCTS
has a collision-free phase assignment if their periods are har-
monic. The word harmonic means that, in a set of periods, one
period is always divisible by all the other periods that are shorter
than it. Similarly, we can let the cyclic link schedule of a wireless
link e
i
be referred to as a periodic task with distance constraint q

i
,
and then the cyclic TDMA schedule L can also be transformed to a
DCTS in which a set of wireless links contend for access to the
wireless channel for periodically transmitting data packets in
xed intervals. However, in a practical data collecting system, it
is almost impossible to guarantee the periods generated in the
period determination stage are harmonic if the sampling rates of
the sensor nodes are arbitrary. Hence, to force the periods to be
harmonic, we let the CyclicMAC scheduler automatically trans-
form the periods into numbers in powers of 2. That is, let q

i
be
the period of e
i
s cyclic link schedule determined by Eq. (7); then
we have
q
i
2
log
2
q

i
2
_ _
: 8
C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644 1635
Note that the transformed period will be smaller or equal to the ori-
ginal one in order to fulll the bandwidth requirement. Due to the
harmonic transformation of the periods in Eq. (8), the resulting cyc-
lic link schedules might allocate more timeslots than the actual
requirement. Hence, using DCS for phase determination seems to
easily degrade the utilization of the wireless channel, and thus de-
creases the system throughput. However, this problem is not too
critical of the CyclicMAC scheduler because these over-allocated
timeslots still have the chance to be reallocated to the other wire-
less links that does not interfere with the current one. Remind that
a timeslot can only be allocated to one of the wireless links that
interference with each other, to prevent packet collision. That is,
we can say that a timeslot is shared among these wireless links
that does not interfere with each other. Even if the current link allo-
cates more timeslots than its demand, the over-allocated timeslots
can be reallocated to the others that have not been scheduled yet.
Table 1 shows the function CyclicMAC-Scheduler which summa-
rizes how the CyclicMAC scheduler determines the phases of a cyc-
lic TDMA schedule. Assume L

is the cyclic TDMA schedule

determined in the period determination stage. From line 2 to line
5, the periods of the cyclic link schedules in L

are all transformed

into harmonic numbers based on 2 according to Eq. (8). From line 6
to line 9, the CyclicMAC scheduler determines the phases of the
cyclic link schedules according to an increasing order based on
their period lengths. Line 8 is the procedure to determine the
phases according to the collision-free requirement, and the func-
tion Collision-Free-Phase-Determination illustrated in Table 2 details
the steps. The phase of a wireless links cyclic link schedule is the
initial delay time to transmit the rst packet. Undoubtedly, the ini-
tial delay time is smaller than the length of a period, i.e., the phase
ranges from 0 to q
i
1 the length of the period. Therefore, the
CyclicMAC scheduler exhaustively goes through the phases from
0 to and picks the rst met phase that will not cause the wireless
link e
i
to interfere with other wireless links that have been sched-
uled, as the function Collision-Free-Phase-Determination does. The
procedure IsCollisionFree illustrated in Table 3 checks if the candi-
date phase conicts with the cyclic link schedules which have been
scheduled, via the facilitation of interference graph I.
The operation of the proposed CyclicMAC scheduler has been
introduced as shown above. However, a TDMA scheduler might fail
to determine a schedule for a data collecting system whose band-
width requirements of some wireless links are too high or the link
degree of some nodes are too dense. In this case, we say that the
system is not schedulable. We then derive the essential conditions
to formulate the schedulability of a data collecting system that ap-
plies the CyclicMAC scheduler. We start the derivation from the
simplest case that the interference graph of a data collecting sys-
tem is a complete graph. In this case, because only one wireless
link can be active at any timeslot, we can use the total bandwidth
requirement of the data collecting system to determine whether
the system is schedulable or not. Let L be the cyclic TDMA schedule
of the data collecting system. Given a time period T, the number of
timeslots allocated by L is
T
q
1

T
q
2

T
q
m
. Thus, the schedulability
condition for L will be as below:

m
i1
T
q
i
6 T )

m
i1
1
q
i
6 1: 9
If the above condition is not true, this implies that L allocates times-
lots more than actual availability, which also implies that L is not
schedulable.
However, in a multihop wireless network, the interference
graph is not necessary to be a complete graph. Inspirited from
[5], we derive the schedulability condition of such a general case
based on the maximal cliques of interference graph. A set of nodes
and edges is called a clique if it induces a complete sub-graph. A
maximal clique is a complete sub-graph that does not contain
any other complete sub-graph. Undoubtedly, a clique in the inter-
ference graph I refers to a set of wireless links that interfere with
each other; therefore, the cyclic link schedules of these wireless
links should satisfy the schedulability condition (Eq. (9)). Hence,
the schedulability of L can be veried by the following lemma:
Lemma 1. Assume I = {C
1
, C
2
, . . ., C
k
}, in which C
k
is a maximal clique
of I. A cyclic TDMA schedule L is schedulable if the below condition is
true:
8C
k
2 I;

e
i
2C
k
1
q
i
6 1:
When the system is not schedulable, it means that the sensors
might send out too many packets so that the resulted trafc
exceeds the capacities of the wireless channels. Undoubtedly, the
data collecting system cannot work perfectly because the band-
width requirement is higher than the upper bound that the net-
work can support. The only solution to let the system workable
is to reduce the amount of packets, e.g., adopting the solutions
fromcongestion control, such as [46], to adjust the period in order
to meet the schedulable condition.
4.3. Toward end-to-end latency efciency
For data collecting systems that collect environmental data dur-
ing emergencies, the end-to-end latency of a data packet is also a
critical optimization goal. The end-to-end latency of a data packet
is the time interval fromthe time the packet leaves the source node
Table 1
Main function of CyclicMAC scheduler.
Function CyclicMAC-Scheduler (L

, I): L
1 let L :{};
2 for each < q

i
; 0 >2 L

do
3
q
i
: 2
log
2
q

i
2
_ _
;
4 put < q
i
,0 > into L;
5 end for;
6 sort all < q
i
,0 >2 L by q
i
in ascending order;
7 for each < q
i
,0 >2 L do
8 invoke Collision-Free-Phase-Determination (e
i
, < q
i
,0 > ,L,I);
9 end for;
10 return L;
Table 2
The function to determine a collision-free phase for wireless link
e
i
.
Function Collision-Free-Phase-Determination
(e
i
, hq
i
,0i ,L, I)
1 for j = 0 to q
i
1 do
2 if IsCollisionFree(j, q
i
, L, I) then
3 /: = j;
4 end if;
5 end for;
Table 3
The function to inspect whether the given phase is
collision-free.
Function IsCollisionFree (/, q
i
, L, I): Boolean
1 for each < q
j
,/
j
>2 L and /
j
0 do
2 if (/%q
j
= /
j
) and I
ij
then
3 return FALSE;
4 end if;
5 end for;
1636 C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644
to the time it is received by the sink. In a multihop network, the
end-to-end latency of a data packet is the summation of the trans-
mission times and the queuing times in the intermediate nodes. The
total transmission time depends on the number of wireless links to
relay the data packet, and it can be effectively reduced by applying
a routing structure with fewer intermediate hops from the source
node to the sink, e.g., a balanced routing tree with small tree
height. The total queuing time depends on the transmission sched-
ules of two consecutive wireless links. That is, if two consecutive
wireless links are active discontinuously, the data packet from
the incoming wireless link will be queued in the intermediate node
to wait for permission to use the outgoing wireless link. In a data
collecting tree, the data packets are transmitted in the direction
from the leaves to the roots. Hence, given a data path from the
source node to the sink, the optimal case is that the transmission
timeslots of any two consecutive wireless links are always contin-
uous to eliminate the queuing time. In this subsection, we improve
the collision-free phase determination toward minimizing the
queuing time to reduce the end-to-end latency.
The phases of the cyclic TDMA schedule are the primary factors
that affect the queuing time. Consider two consecutive wireless
links, e
i
and e
j
, where e
j
is the parent of e
i
(i.e., the data packets will
be delivered from e
i
to e
j
). Let hq
i
, /
i
i and hq
j
, /
j
i be the cyclic link
schedules of e
i
and e
j
, respectively. Recall that the source nodes
of e
i
and e
j
are n
i
and n
j
, respectively. Hence, the data packets of
n
i
will be transmitted through e
i
and possibly be queued in n
j
to
wait for the transmission timeslot to access e
j
. Consider an exam-
ple thathq
i
, /
i
i = h32,16i and hq
j
, /
j
i = h4, 1i. If we unroll these two
cyclic link schedules, the transmission timeslots of e
i
and e
j
will
be {16, 48, 80, . . .} and {5, 9, 13, 17, . . ., 49, . . . , 81, . . .}, respectively.
Note that in this case, every data packet transmitted by e
i
will be
immediately relayed by e
j
in the subsequent timeslot, i.e., the pack-
et will not be queued in the intermediate node n
j
. However, if
hq
i
, /
i
i = h32, 15i, the unrolled transmission timeslots of e
i
will be
{15, 47, 79, . . .}, so the data packets transmitted by e
i
will be queued
for 1 timeslot in n
j
. In cyclic TDMA schedule, the queuing time is
deterministic if the periods are harmonic. Assuming q
i
> q
j
, the
queuing time between hq
i
, /
i
i and hq
j
, /
j
i can be computed as
below:
QueueTimehq
i
; /
i
i; hq
j
; /
j
i

/
j

/
i
q
j
_ _
1
_ _
q
i
/
i
1; if/
i
%q
j
> /
j
/
j

/
i
q
j
_ _
q
i
/
i
1; otherwise:
_

_
10
Consider the rst transmission period {0, 1, . . . , q
i
} of e
i
. The case that
(/
i
%q
j
) > /
j
means that when the rst packet transmitted by the
child link e
i
was received by the source node of the parent link e
j
,
the parent link e
j
has already used its active timeslot of the current
period, i.e., the
/
i
q
j
_ _
th
period, to transmit other packets. Hence, the
packet from e
i
must be queued in the intermediate node n
j
to wait
for the next period. Thus, the next closest active timeslot of e
j
will
be /
j

/
i
q
j
_ _
1
_ _
q
i
, so the queuing time will be /
j

b
/
i
q
j
c 1
_ _
q
i
/
1
1. In the other case where (/
i
%q
j
) 6 /
j
, the
parent link e
j
has not used its active timeslot of the current period,
so the queue time will be /
j
b
/
i
q
j
c
_ _
q
i
/
i
1.
By using Eq. (10), the function Latency-Efcient-Phase-Determi-
nation depicted in Table 4 can greedily pick the phases that induce
a minimum queuing time. From line 1 to line 12 in the function
Latency-Efcient-Phase-Determination, the CyclicMAC scheduler
determines the phase of a wireless link e
i
s cyclic link schedule.
Let e
j
be the parent link of e
i
(Line 1). In line 3 to line 11, the Cyclic-
MAC scheduler greedily searches the phase that is collision-free
and induces the smallest queuing time among all the candidate
phases. The function ends after all the phases are checked (Line
12).
4.4. Latency analysis
In this subsection, we analyze the end-to-end latency of a given
cyclic schedule generated by the CyclicMAC scheduler. Recall that
the end-to-end latency of a data packet is the time interval from
the time the packet leaves the source node to the time it is received
by the sink, and let Queue Time(hq
i
, /
i
i, hq
j
, /
j
i) represent the queu-
ing time of a packet from a wireless link e
i
to its parent link e
j
. In a
data collecting tree, a data packet will be relayed by several inter-
mediate wireless links before arriving at the sink node. The end-to-
end latency of a data packet will be the summation of the trans-
mission times of the wireless links and the queuing times in the
intermediate nodes during the transmission. Let a sensor node n
i
be i hops away from the sink n
0
, and let P = {e
i
, e
i1
, . . ., e
j
, . . ., e
2
, e
1
}
be the end-to-end path that relays the data packets from the
source node n
i
to the sink n
0
, where each e
j
2 E and is the jth inter-
mediate link of P from the sink to the source node n
i
. Due to the
basic principle of TDMA summarized in Section 3, a wireless link
will spend one timeslot to transmit a data packet, so the total
transmission time of the wireless links will be jPj timeslots, where
jPj is the number of intermediate links from the source node n
i
to
the sink n
0
. Hence, let Latency(jPj) denote the end-to-end latency
(in number of timeslots) of a data packet along the path
P;Latency(jPj) is computed as below:
LatencyjPj

e
k
;e
k1
2P
QueueTimehq
k1
; /
k1
i; hq
k
; /
k
i jPj:
Based on the latency metric, we then discuss the end-to-end latency
of the CyclicMAC scheduler in the sparsely deployed data collection
system, and in the densely deployed data collection system.
[Sparsely deployed data collection system]. A sparsely deployed
data collection system refers to the data collection system in which
a wireless link is only interfered by its parent and sibling links. For
a wireless link, the CyclicMAC scheduler must pick the phase that
will not conict with the schedules of its parent and sibling links.
In addition, as the phase will affect the length of queuing time,
CyclicMAC scheduler should carefully determine the phase for each
wireless link in order to minimize the end-to-end latency. We will
show that, with the heuristic, Latency-Efcient-Phase-Determina-
tion, the CyclicMAC will generate a schedule that lets the queuing
time of a packet transmission on each hop be zero in sparsely de-
ployed data collection system. Because the transmission time can-
not be eliminated, such a schedule leads to an optimal end-to-end
latency. The proof is as below:
Table 4
Determine the phase with consideration of end-to-end latency.
Function Latency-Efcient-Phase-Determination
(e
j
, hq
i
, 0i,L, I)
1 let e
j
be the parent link of e
i
, i.e., Parent
i
;
2 MinQueueTime :MAXVALUE;
3 for h = 0 to q
i
1 do
4 if IsCollisionFree(h, q
i
, L, I) then
5 tmp : QueueTime (q
i
, h, q
j
, /
j
);
6 if tmp < MinQueueTime then
7 MinQueueTime : tmp;
8 /
i
: h;
9 end if;
10 end if;
11 end for;
12 puthq
i
, /
i
i into L;
C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644 1637
Theorem 1. In a data collecting system, if
(a) the periods of a cyclic TDMA schedule L satisfy the bandwidth
requirements of the wireless links i:e:; 8e
i
2 E; q
i
6
1
s
i

e
j
2Children
i
1
q
j
_ _
,
(b) the periods in L are schedulable, and
(c) each wireless link only has interference with its parent link and
its sibling links,
the function Latency-Efcient-Phase-Determination can always
nd phases for the cyclic TDMA schedule L to ensure the end-to-end
latency of a data packet will always be equivalent to the link count
from the source node to the sink, in units of timeslot. The above
condition can be formally represented as below:
LatencyP jPj;
where P is an end-to-end path in the data collecting system.
Proof. The theorem is proven if we can show that the queuing
time of any pair of consecutive wireless links is zero so that the
end-to-end latency of P will be equal to the number of its wireless
links, i.e., jPj. Therefore, the goal is to prove the queue time will be
zero. That is,

e
k
;e
k1
2P
QueueTimehq
k1
; /
k1
i; hq
k
; /
k
i 0:
Remember that we have assumed that the wireless links do not
have any interference relationship except their parent links and
their sibling links. Therefore, we can derive the end-to-end latency
of a data packet under distinct numbers of intermediate links (i.e.,
distinct values of jPj) to prove Theorem 1, as below:
jPj = 1: The total transmission time will be one timeslot if the
source node n
1
is the one hop neighbor of the sink node.
Besides, the end-to-end latency of the data packet from n
1
will
be zero because the wireless link e
1
can only interfere with its
sibling links. Note that the sibling links of e
1
with shorter peri-
ods than q
1
will be scheduled prior to e
1
, e.g., e
k
and e
l
in Fig. 4
have been scheduled. In addition, because all the periods are
harmonic, q
1
will be an integral multiple of the hyper-period
of q
k
and q
l
. This implies that in a period of e
1
, the cyclic link
schedules of these sibling links will repeat several times. That
is, in each period q
1
, the timeslot allocations for e
k
and e
l
will
be the same, as illustrated in Fig. 4. Hence, once CyclicMAC
can pick an initial offset /
1
in the rst period to be the phases
of e
1
, the timeslots {/
1
+ q
1
, /
1
+ 2 q
1
, /
1
+ 3 q
1
, . . .} will also
be available for e
1
. But if no such available timeslot is found in
the rst period, CyclicMAC will also be unable to nd such a
timeslot in the following periods. This implies that q
1
is not
schedulable, which violates assumption (b). Based on the above,
we have proven that if the period q
1
is schedulable, no queuing
time will be necessary to transmit a packet from n
1
to the sink.
jPj = 2: The total transmission time will be two timeslots if the
source node n
i
is two hops away from the sink node. We then
prove that a data packet from n
i
will be transmitted to the sink
in two timeslots.
Assume P = {e
1
,e
2
} is an end-to-end path from a node n
2
to the
sink n
0
. Let q
2
be the period of the cyclic link schedule of e
2
,
and let q
1
be the period of the cyclic link schedule of e
1
. The goal
is to determine a phase /
2
for e
2
in the range from 0 to q
2
1 so
that, Queue Time(hq
2
, /
2
i, hq
1
, /
1
i) = 0. Which implies that the
data packets can be transmitted to the sink in 2 timeslots.
Because e
1
will not only transmit its own data packets but also
relay the data packets fromits child link e
2
, the period rho
1
must
be equal to or shorter than q
2
. Note that e
2
might interfere with
its parent link (i.e., e
1
) and sibling links. Thus, when determin-
ing the phase of the link e
2
, the phases of (1) the parent link
e
1
, (2) e
1
s sibling links with shorter periods than q
2
, and (3)
e
2
s sibling links with shorter periods than must have been
determined. Therefore, there is no need to prove that in each
period q
2
, the timeslot allocations for these scheduled links will
be the same, as illustrated in Fig. 5. Hence, once CyclicMAC can
pick an initial offset /
2
in the rst period to be the phases of e
2
,
the timeslots {/
2
+ q
2
, /
2
+ 2 q
2
, /
2
+ 3 q
2
, . . .} will always be
available for e
2
. Thus, we have proven that if the period q
2
is
schedulable, no queuing time will be necessary to transmit a
packet from e
2
to e
1
.
jPj = f: Assume that the above condition is fullled for an end-
to-end path whose length is f; in other words, there are f wire-
less links in P (i.e., P = {e
f
, e
f1,
. . . , e
1
}), and the end-to-end
latency of P will be f timeslots. Fig. 6 illustrates such an
example.
jPj = f + 1: An end-to-end path P = {e
f+1
,e
f
, e
f1
, . . ., e
1
} whose
length is P = f + 1 must include an end-to-end path
{e
f
, e
f1,
. . ., e
1
} whose length is f. Based on the above induction,
the end-to-end latency of the path {e
f
, e
f1,
. . ., e
1
} will be f.
Fig. 4. The timeslot allocation that allows the data packets from n
1
to be immediately transmitted to the sink.
Fig. 5. The timeslot allocation that allows the data packets from e
2
to be transmitted by e
1
immediately.
1638 C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644
Hence, if we can nd a phase for e
f+1
that will let a packet from
e
f+1
be transmitted by e
f
immediately, the end-to-end latency of
jP j will be f + 1. Note that e
f
is the rst link of the path
{e
f
, e
f1,
. . ., e
1
} and also the second link of P = {e
f+1
, e
f
, e
f1,
. . ., e
1
}.
Hence, q
f
, which is the period of e
f
, will be allocated with a
shorter period than the period of e
f+1
. Note that e
f+1
might inter-
fere with its parent link (e.g., e
f
) and sibling links. Thus, when
determining the phase of e
f+1
, (1) the parent link e
f
and its sib-
ling links with shorter periods than q
f+1
, (2) e
f
s downstream
links and their sibling links with shorter periods than q
f+1
,
and (3) e
f+1
s sibling links with shorter periods than q
f+1
must
have been determined. Because the periods are all harmonic,
the period q
f+1
will be an integral multiple of the hyper-period
of (1)q
f
, (2) the periods of e
f
s sibling links with shorter periods
than q
f+1
, (3) the periods of e
f
s downstream links and their sib-
ling links with shorter periods than q
f+1
, and (4) the periods of
e
f+1
s sibling links with shorter periods than q
f+1
. Once Cyclic-
MAC can pick an offset /
f+1
to be the phase of e
f+1
, the timeslots
{/
f+1
+ q
f+1
, /
f+1
+ 2 q
f+1
, /
f+1
+ 3 q
f+1
, . . .} will always be
available for e
f+1
. Otherwise, this implies that q
f+1
is not sched-
ulable, which violates assumption (b).
Based on the above induction, we have proven that the function
Latency-Efcient-Phase-Determination will pick phases for a cyclic
TDMA schedule to obtain an optimal end-to-end latency if all the
wireless links only interfere with their parent links and sibling
links. Such ideal case is although restricted but still reasonable in
a sparsely deployed wireless sensor network.
[Densely deployed data collection system]In case of densely de-
ployed data collecting system, a wireless link interferes with not
only the parent and sibling links, but also the wireless links of
the other sub-trees. That is, when determining the phase for a
wireless link, CyclicMAC scheduler might not be able to assign
the phase leading to zero queuing time to the wireless link because
such phase might conict with the cyclic link schedule of a nearby
link. In that case, the function Latency-Efcient-Phase-Determina-
tion (line 4 to line 10) will greedily select the phase that will queue
the data packet for just one timeslot. If no such phase is available,
the function Latency-Efcient-Phase-Determination will select the
phase that queues the data packet for two timeslots. This phase
determination process will continue until a phase is selected or
the phase offset exceeds the period length. Such additional latency
will be at most the number of its interfering neighbor wireless
links. That is, assuming the data collecting system is schedulable,
the resulted end-to-end latency of schedule L will be as below:
max
8P2E
jPj

e
j
2P
jI
j
j where jI
j
j is the number of e
j
s neighbor in I
_
_
_
_
;
where P is an end-to-end path in a data collecting tree E, and I is the
corresponding interference graph.
5. Simulation results
In this section, we evaluate the performance of the CyclicMAC
scheduler via simulation. We use TOSSIM-CC2420 [27] to simulate
a network containing some sensor nodes equipped with a Chipcon
CC2420 wireless transceiver. We compare CyclicMAC with three
popular MAC mechanisms, which are commonly used on wireless
sensor networks as follows:
EDF-based TDMA: EDF-based TDMA is a typical timetable-
based TDMA scheduler. It lists the transmissions within the
hyper-period of the sampling periods of the sensor nodes. Note
that the total packet transmissions include those directly
launched by the sensor nodes and the corresponding relaying
transmission. Then, EDF-based scheduler species a timeslot
to every packet transmission according to the Earliest Deadline
First policy. Notably, EDF-based scheduler has been proven to
be optimal in reducing end-to-end latency[12].
Coloring TDMA: In Coloring TDMA, each wireless link is
assigned a timeslot ID, which indicates a color in the coloring
algorithm. The coloring algorithm is executed based on the
interference graph of the network so that two wireless links
that interfere with one another will not be assigned to the same
timeslot. The order of color assignment is in the order of Depth
First Search (DFS) from the sink to the leaf nodes in order to
minimize the end-to-end latency. That is, during traversing of
the data collecting tree, each visited wireless link will be
assigned a timeslot that is closest to the timeslot assigned to
its parent.
CSMA: The default MAC mechanism supported by TOSSIM-
CC2420 is CSMA. Before transmitting a packet, a sensor node
will wait for a random period and then assess the channel con-
dition via a Channel Clear Assessment (CCA) hardware compo-
nent to ensure the channel is clear for transmission. If the
channel is not clear, the sensor node will wait for an additional
random period and check the CCA again to see if the channel is
clear to send.
We then conduct several simulations with distinct sampling
rates and deviations to evaluate the performances of the above
schedulers. In each simulation, we assume that the timeslot length
is 4 ms, which is capable of transmitting one 42-byte packet with a
29-byte payload. The data packets are not aggregated by the inter-
mediate nodes due to their heterogeneous nature. Additionally, the
queue size of each sensor node is 420 bytes, i.e., capable to queue
10 packets. If the queue is full, the oldest data packet will be
dropped and considered as a lost packet. The simulation is re-
peated for three rounds; in each round, the simulation lasts for
5 min and then generates the following performance metrics:
Delivery rate: The ratio of the packets successfully received by
the sink.
End-to-end latency of a data packet: The duration between the
time that a data packet leaves the source node to the time that
it is received by the sink node.
5.1. Table size
In the previous section, we analyzed the space complexity of a
timetable-based TDMA schedule. For a static data collecting sys-
tem, the length of the hyper-period (i.e., the least common multi-
ple) of the sampling periods affects the size of the timetable. The
worst case of the table size will be the production of all the sam-
pling periods, which will be exponential, and such a large table
could be too large for practical WSN-based applications. But if
the sampling periods are in harmonic form, the length of the hy-
per-period will be equal to the longest period. In this subsection,
we will demonstrate how the sampling rates and their deviations
impact the timetable size via simulation. In the following simula-
tions, we randomly generate 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, and 30 sensor
n
f+1
n
0
...
f+1 hops
f hops
e
f
e
f+1
e
1
n
1 n
f
Fig. 6. An end-to-end path with f intermediate links.
C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644 1639
nodes, and a minimum hop tree is constructed above the sensor
nodes. We compare the maximum size of the TDMA schedule ta-
bles generated by the EDF-based TDMA scheduler and CyclicMAC.
In the EDF-based TDMA schedule, each table entry species a
transmission timeslot for a wireless link, and the size of a table en-
try is 5 bytes, i.e., 1 byte for the wireless link id and 4 bytes for the
timeslot id. We also assume that a sensor node only keeps the nec-
essary entries that specify its transmission timeslots of its adjacent
wireless links.
In the rst simulation, the average sampling rate of the sensor
nodes is set to 2.5 Hz (i.e., the corresponding sampling period is
100 timeslots). We dene the deviation as the difference between
the upper bound and the average, the same to the difference be-
tween the lower bound and the average. The deviation of the sam-
pling rate in this simulation is set to 50%, i.e., the possible sampling
periods range from 50 to 150 timeslots. As mentioned above, the
schedule table of a sensor node in EDF-based TDMA should specify
sufcient transmission timeslots to transmit the data packets of
the sensor itself and its upstream nodes. The number of entries
in the schedule table of the node is primarily determined by three
major factors: the number of upstream nodes, the sampling rates
of the node and its upstream nodes, and the length of the hyper-
period of the sampling periods of these nodes. The worst case of
the table size will happen if the following three conditions are all
satised: (1) the sink has only one child node, (2) all the other sen-
sor nodes are the children of this child node, and (3) the sampling
periods of these nodes are all prime numbers. In our simulation,
the average sampling rate is 2.5 Hz (i.e., the average sampling per-
iod of the sensor nodes is 100 timeslots), and the largest number of
sensor nodes is 30. Since the deviation of the sampling rates is 50%,
the worst case in such a scenario happens when the sampling peri-
ods of these 30 sensor nodes are the largest 30 prime numbers in
the range from 50 to 150 timeslots. Since the size of a table entry
is 5 bytes, the size of the entire schedule table in the worst case
will be tens of Gigabytes, which is an incredible large storage
requirement. Fig. 7(a) illustrates our simulation results that dem-
onstrate the relationship between the maximum TDMA schedule
table size and the number of sensor nodes in EDF-based TDMA
and CyclicMAC. As expected, when the number of sensor nodes in-
creases, the schedule table size will grow exponentially. When the
number of sensor nodes increases up to 30, the size of the EDF-
based TDMA schedule table will be larger than 350 M bytes.
In the next simulation, we still set the average sampling rate to
2.5 Hz and then vary its deviation to 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, and 50%.
Fig. 7(b) illustrates the relationship between the table size and the
deviation of sampling rate in EDF-based TDMA and CyclicMAC.
This gure illustrates an apparent trend that a larger deviation of
the sampling rate implies a larger EDF-based schedule table.
Hence, we conclude that, in a data collecting system, the table size
is primarily affected by the number of sensor nodes, the sampling
rates, and the deviation of sampling rates. The simulation results
also demonstrate that the EDF-based TDMA schedule is only
affordable to a data collecting system containing just a few sensor
nodes, and all of these nodes must operate homogeneously. Both
the gures also show that under all the above congurations, the
CyclicMAC scheduler always generates a constant and small-sized
schedule table, which is more desirable to the sensor nodes with
limited resources.
5.2. Performance evaluation
In this subsection, we evaluate the performance of CyclicMAC
when the sampling rates of the sensor nodes are in different levels
of deviation. In detail, the average sampling rates of the sensor
nodes are set to 2.5 Hz, 1.3 Hz, 0.8 Hz, 0.6 Hz, or 0.5 Hz, and the
deviation of its sampling rate is set to 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, or 50%.
We generate ten topologies, which all contain 30 sensor nodes that
are randomly separated in a eld of 290 235 square meters. Fig. 8
illustrates one of these network topologies in the simulation. We
let the transmission range of CC2420 radio be 50 m, because it
can achieve 99% delivery rate if no interference happens under this
conguration. We build the underline network topology based on
this information, above which we build a routing tree whose tree
height equals 7 hops. For convenience, the interference graph of
the network topology is also built based on the distance based
interference model. That is, two wireless links will interfere with
each other if (1) the distance between their source nodes is shorter
than or equal to 50 m, or (2) the distance between the destination
node of one wireless link and the source node of the other wireless
link is shorter than or equal to 50 m.
Fig. 9(a) compares the average system delivery rates of EDF-
based TDMA, Coloring TDMA, CSMA, and CyclicMAC under differ-
ent sampling rates over the randomly generated networks. In gen-
eral, the delivery rates of the three TDMA-based protocols are
much better than that of the CSMA protocol. This is because CSMA
highly suffers the hidden station problem [28]. Even if the sam-
pling rate is low, the hidden station problem also incurs extensive
packet collisions. Moreover, the Coloring TDMA performs poorly
when the sampling rate is high. This is because the Coloring TDMA
scheduler allocates the transmission timeslots based on the inter-
ference graph rather than the bandwidth requirements of the wire-
less links. Hence, when the sampling rate is high, a lot of data
packets will be queued too long in the sensor nodes and nally
could be dropped, thus decreasing the packet delivery rate.
Fig. 9(b) illustrates the average delivery rates of the nodes with dif-
ferent distances to sink node. The delivery rates of the TDMA-based
schedulers are still higher than the CSMA protocol. However, we
Fig. 7. The size of TDMA schedule tables generated by different schedulers: (a) the
number of sensor nodes vs. maximum table size; (b) the deviation of sampling rate
vs. maximum table size.
1640 C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644
also observe that as the distance increases, the delivery rate of Col-
oring TDMA signicantly decreases. This is also because Coloring
TDMA does not consider the heterogeneous bandwidth require-
ments on wireless links. In overview, the EDF-based scheduler per-
forms similarly to CyclicMAC on the delivery rate. However, as
mentioned in the previous sub-section, the overhead on schedule
table size of EDF is much larger than that of CyclicMAC.
Fig. 9(c) shows the comparisons on the end-to-end latencies
and the corresponding deviations in EDF-based TDMA, Coloring
TDMA, and CyclicMAC. As we mentioned in the previous subsec-
tion, the mechanism of CSMA differs too much from those of the
other TDMA-based schedulers, and the delivery rate of CSMA is
also too low, so we just ignore CSMA in this simulation. Obviously,
the end-to-end latency of Coloring TDMA is the worst among the
three TDMA schedulers. This is also because the Coloring TDMA
does not consider the heterogeneous bandwidth requirements on
wireless links, so the queuing time lengthens the end-to-end la-
tency. On the other hand, the end-to-end latency of EDF-based
TDMA is slightly shorter than that of CyclicMAC; however, the
extensive table size of EDF-based TDMA makes it infeasible to be
applied in a resource limited WSN. In addition, the deviations of
the end-to-end latency of CyclicMAC are slightly smaller than
those of EDF-based TDMA. This result shows that the CyclicMAC
induces amore static behavior in packet deliveries, which is bene-
cial to the management of the sensor data. As CyclicMAC has a
delivery rate, an end-to-end latency similar to EDF-based TDMA,
and a static packet delivery behaviors but requires much less stor-
age overhead on TDMA schedule tables, CyclicMAC is considered as
the most balanced solution among these TDMA schedulers.
Finally, we evaluate the improvement on end-to-end latency
caused by the proposed latency minimization function Latency-
Efcient-Phase-Determination. Without the proposed latency mini-
mization function, the consecutive wireless links might not be able
to transmit data in contiguous timeslots. This implies that a data
packet might be queued for a while in an intermediate link, and
thus the end-to-end latency will increase. The simulation result
illustrated in Fig. 10 conforms to our expectation. With the
proposed latency minimization function, the end-to-end latency
can be reduced to around half of the original.
5.3. Bridge monitoring: a case study
In this section, we evaluate CyclicMAC using the conguration of
a practical bridge monitoring application. This bridge monitoring
system is to monitor the health state of the Chun-Chen Bridge,
which connects Taipei City and Taipei County in Taiwan. Table 5
illustrates both the placements of the sensor nodes on the bridge
and the topology of the underlying wireless networks. The length
of the Chun-Chen Bridge is 400 meters, and the distance of farthest
pair of sensor nodes are 50 m. Table 5 lists the sensors used in this
scenario, including their locations and sampling rates. Note that the
accelerometers are placed on positions {1, 9, 10, 11, 12}, which are
close to the sink, and these sensors generate an extensive amount of
sample data which is not affordable to the wireless channel. Recall
that the payload of a packet in our simulator is 29 bytes, so we let
these high sampling rate sensor nodes continuously feed the sam-
ple data to the payload of a packet and transmit the packet until
the payload is full, thus reducing the packet transmission rates.
However, even with this down-sampling mechanism, the bridge
monitoring system still has some challenges with packet transmis-
sion. Apparently, the trafc in the area near to the sink node is hea-
vy, implying that a large amount of packet collisions might occur. If
a MAC protocol does not arrange the packet transmission well, the
packet delivery rate will decrease dramatically, whilst the end-to-
end latency will increase signicantly.
Fig. 11(a) shows the resulting delivery rates of EDF-based
TDMA, CSMA, Coloring TDMA, and CyclicMAC scheduler. The deliv-
ery rate of CSMA is only about 30% and is the worst among the four
MAC protocols. This is because the trafc around the sink is so
crowded that the CCA of each sensor node in this area is usually
aware of the transmissions of data packets, thus the sensor node
usually cannot send its packets. This, therefore, lets the packets
be easily queued too long in some intermediate nodes and nally
leads to packet loss due to queue overowing. In addition, even
Fig. 8. The network topology used in the simulation.
C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644 1641
if the CCA acknowledges that the channel is clear to send, packet
collision still could happen due to the hidden station problem
[28]. Coloring TDMA prevents packet collision, so it has a higher
delivery rate than CSMA. However, the coloring algorithm assigns
the timeslots based on the network topology rather than the band-
width requirements of the wireless links, so we expect that the
data packets might be queued in some intermediate nodes too
long, even being dropped due to queue overowing. As we ex-
pected, Fig. 11(a) shows that Coloring TDMA can only successfully
deliver 77% of the data packets. This gure also illustrates that both
EDF-based TDMA and CyclicMAC can deliver almost 100% of the
data packets, which are the best in this application.
The bridge monitoring system must collect the sample data for
alarming the emergencies, like bridge breaking, so the end-to-end
latency is also important. Because the mechanism of CSMA differs
too much from those of the other TDMA-based schedulers, and the
delivery rate of CSMA is also too low, we just ignore CSMA in this
simulation. Fig. 11(b) shows the end-to-end latencies of EDF-based
TDMA, Coloring TDMA, and CyclicMAC. With the same results in
the previous subsection, the latency of Coloring TDMA is the worst
among the three TDMA schedulers, and the latencies of EDF-based
TDMA and CyclicMAC are very similar in this scenario. CyclicMAC
only performs slightly worse than EDF-based TDMA on the nodes
whose distances from the sink are 7 and 8 hops, respectively.
The above simulation results demonstrate that the EDF-based
TDMA seems a suitable solution to a static data collecting system
because it can support both the highest delivery rate and the short-
est end-to-end latency. However, the simulation results in Section
5.1 have demonstrated that the EDF-based TDMA will generate a
huge TDMA schedule table that is not affordable to resource-lim-
ited sensor nodes. On the other hand, the delivery rate and the
end-to-end latency of CyclicMAC are almost the same as the
EDF-based TDMA. Besides, unlike the EDF-based TDMA, CyclicMAC
just requires a tiny TDMA schedule table. Hence, CyclicMAC seems
to provide a more practical solution to a WSN-based data collecting
system.
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
0.5 0.6 0.8 1.3 2.5
D
e
l
i
v
e
r
y

R
a
t
e

(
%
)
Sampling Rate (Hz)
CyclicMAC
EDF
Coloring
CSMA
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
D
e
l
i
v
e
r
y

R
a
t
e

(
%
)
Distance (hops to sink)
CyclicMAC
EDF
Coloring
CSMA
0.00
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
E
n
d
-
t
o
-
E
n
d

L
a
t
e
n
c
y
(
s
e
c
o
n
d
s
)
Distance (hops to sink)
CyclicMAC
EDF
Coloring
Deviation (%)
hops
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
CyclicMAC
0.0% 0.1% 1.8% 6.2% 10.1% 7.1% 14.1% 11.3%
EDF
0.0% 11.2% 12.0% 20.9% 12.5% 14.9% 12.5% 21.5%
Coloring
88.5% 88.5% 86.8% 51.7% 48.7% 46.7% 44.7% 42.8%
(a)
(b)
(c)
Fig. 9. Network performance of different schedulers: (a) delivery rates vs. sampling rates; (b) delivery rates vs. the distances from the nodes to the sink; (c) average end-to-
end latencies vs. the distances from the nodes to the sink.
1642 C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644
6. Conclusion and future works
In this paper, we have proposed a TDMA scheduler, called
CyclicMAC scheduler, that fullls the three design issues of a struc-
tural health monitoring (SHM) application over a multihop wire-
less sensor network. For a given routing structure and bandwidth
requirement of each wireless link, CyclicMAC scheduler can gener-
ate a cyclic TDMA schedule with minimum end-to-end latency. A
cyclic TDMA schedule only occupies a small amount of memory
space, and this advantage makes it suitable to be stored and ex-
changed in a resource limited wireless sensor network. Besides,
the schedule not only satises the heterogeneous bandwidth
requirements of distinct wireless links but also reduces the end-
to-end latency of transmitting a data packet. We have proven that
in an ideal case where each wireless link only interferes with its
parent link and sibling links, the schedule will not induce any
queuing time so that the end-to-end latency of transmitting a
packet is optimal. Such ideal case is although restricted but still
reasonable in a sparsely deployed wireless sensor network. And
in other cases, our schedule also results in a bounded end-to-end
latency of transmitting a packet. We have compared the perfor-
mance of CyclicMAC with those of an EDF-based TDMA, Coloring
TDMA, and CSMA over 10 randomly deployed networks and a real
bridge monitoring system. Simulation results have demonstrated
that the EDF-based TDMA scheduler has both the highest packet
delivery rate and the shortest end-to-end latency, but it might gen-
erate a huge TDMA schedule table that is not affordable to a re-
source-limited sensor node. In addition, CyclicMAC scheduler
performs almost as efciently as the EDF-based TDMA scheduler
but requires only a tiny TDMA schedule table. With these advanta-
ges, CyclicMAC is considered to be an ideal MAC scheduler to real-
time WSN applications whose data sampling rates are static.
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
0.70
0.80
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
E
n
d
-
t
o
-
E
n
d

L
a
t
e
n
c
y
(
s
e
c
o
n
d
s
)
Distances (hops to sink)
With latency minimization
Without latency
minimization
Deviation (%)
hops
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
With latency
minimization
0.0% 0.1% 1.8% 6.2% 10.1% 7.1% 14.1% 11.3%
Without latency
minimization
0.0% 0.1% 2.0% 7.0% 10.1% 8.1% 14.0% 11.0%
Fig. 10. Effectiveness of different phase determinations on the end-to-end latency.
Table 5
A Topology of a bridge monitoring system.List of sensor nodes.
Sensor type Sampling
rate (Hz)
Data size for
a sample
Location
Accelerometer 100 6 bytes 1, 9, 10
Thermal sensor 1 1 byte 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12
Settlement Gauges 1 1 byte 13
Inclinometer 0.125 1 byte 7, 8, 14
Fig. 11. Network performances of different MAC schedulers: (a) delivery rate; (b)
average end-to-end latencies vs. the distances from the nodes to the sink.
C.-Y. Lin et al. / Computer Communications 34 (2011) 16301644 1643
To extend CyclicMAC, we will further explore a number of is-
sues. The rst is to improve the utilization of the timeslots. Recall
that in CyclicMAC, the lengths of the periods are transformed into
harmonic numbers so that the timeslots can be scheduled via the
Distance Constraint scheduler. The transformed periods must be
shorter than or equal to the original ones; hence, there might be
some wastage in utilization because the number of allocated
timeslots might exceed the actual requirement. This problem is
actually not too critical in CyclicMAC because these timeslots still
have a second chance to be allocated to other links, as we have
mentioned in Section 4. However, a more accurate period assign-
ment still could further improve the timeslot utilization. Han
et al. [26] have also mentioned a similar problem in real-time sys-
tem scheduling, and they have proposed a Distance-constraint
scheduling algorithm that determines the base number of the har-
monic sequence whose the multiples better ts the original peri-
ods; thus the wastage is reduced. We will investigate the
algorithm to check if it can benet the period determination of
the cyclic TDMA scheduling.
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