  One of the major challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is the
mitigation of collisions due to simultaneous transmissions by multiple nodes
over a common channel which are located in a proximity. TDMA-based channel
access provides energy-efficient and collision-free transmissions. It is
especially suitable for traffic with periodic transmission patterns and
guaranteed QoS requirements. For that reason, a large number of TDMA-scheduling
algorithms are available in the literature, and consequently, a good number of
survey papers on TDMA-scheduling algorithms have been written. In this work, we
propose a novel classification framework to categorize the existing
TDMA-scheduling algorithms available for WSNs. As against existing survey
works, the proposed framework possess certain new dimensions (categories) to
classify existing TDMA-scheduling algorithms. Additionally, we introduce a
couple of new sub-categories for the existing classes which would help
researchers to even differentiate between two TDMA-Scheduling algorithms that
are assumed to be similar as per existing classification schemes. Finally, we
also discuss few important works in the context of proposed classification
scheme.
