A Survey of TDMA Scheduling Schemes in Wireless Multihop Networks

One of the major problems in wireless multihop networks is the scheduling of transmissions in a fair and efficient manner. Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) seems to be one of the dominant solutions to achieve this goal since it is a simple scheme and can prolong the devices’ lifetime by allowing them to transmit only a portion of the time during conversation. For that reason, several TDMA scheduling algorithms may be found in the literature. The scope of this article is to classify the existing TDMA scheduling algorithms based on several factors, such as the entity that is scheduled, the network topology information that is needed to produce or maintain the schedule, and the entity or entities that perform the computation that produces and maintains the schedules, and to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each category.