A maximal concurrency and low latency distributed scheduling protocol for wireless sensor networks

Existing work that schedules concurrent transmissions collision-free suffers from low channel utilization. We propose the Optimal Node Activation Multiple Access (ONAMA) protocol to achieve maximal channel spatial reuse through a distributed maximal independent set (DMIS) algorithm. To overcome DMIS’s excessive delay in finding a maximal independent set, we devise a novel technique called pipelined precomputation that decouples DMIS from data transmission. We implement ONAMA on resource-constrained TelosB motes using TinyOS. Extensive measurements on two testbeds independently attest to ONAMA’s superb performance compared to existing work: improving concurrency, throughput, and delay by a factor of 3.7, 3.0, and 5.3, respectively, while still maintaining reliability.