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In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), different motes may transmit packets concurrently, i.e., having overlapping transmission periods. As a result of this contention, there are no packet reception guarantees and significant bandwidth can be lost. This contention can have a strong impact on the performance together with other kinds of interference sources, e.g., ambient noise. As a result, WSN’s connectivity tends to have a very dynamic nature.

In this paper, we devise DecTDMA (Decentralized-TDMA), a fully decentralized medium access controller (MAC) that significantly reduces contention. It is based on a self-stabilizing algorithm for time division multiple access (TDMA). This self-stabilizing TDMA algorithm uses no external assistance or external references, such as wireless access points (WAPs) and globally-synchronized clocks. We present the design and implementation of DecTDMA and report encouraging …