# Sensing and Device Neighborhood-Based Slot Assignment Approach for the Internet of Things
## 1 Introduction  
Recent developments in Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems have made Electro-Magnetic Sensing and the Internet of Things (IoT) constitute challenging research areas, which is due to the overwhelming characteristics of these technologies, such as a convergence capacity with numerous emerging technologies and a wide range of application areas [1]. The IoT is a collection of various devices, i.e., \(C_{i}\) and \(S_{j}\), which are known as \"things\" where \(C_{i}\) and \(S_{j}\) represent ordinary and server devices, respectively, such that \(i=1\ldots n\) and \(j=1\ldots m\), i.e., \(n~{}>~{}m\). A thing is defined as any physical (preferably mechanical) entity or object with different embedded modules, such as sensing, processing, and communication [2, 3]. Additionally, these devices should be smart enough to form an operational networking infrastructure and possibly without human intervention [4, 5, 6]. Generally, devices belonging to the operational IoT networks are either static or mobile, i.e., (i) Both \(C_{i}\) and \(S_{j}\) are static (ii) For \(C_{i}\) and \(S_{j}\), the former is static whereas later is mobile (iii) \(C_{i}\) and \(S_{j}\) are mobile. It is to be noted that the communication mechanisms are the same--that is, wireless communication protocols--and preferably designed for resource constraint networks [5, 7]. Cluster-enabled networking infrastructures are reported in the literature to account for how a device \(C_{i}\) with limited transmission power should be able to share its collected data with the intended destination module--that is, server \(S_{j}\) in this case. In these networks, devices, \(C_{i}\) becomes divided into two groups: (i) an ordinary device and a (ii) cluster head (CH). The former device is used for data collection purposes only, whereas the latter is utilized toprocess and send it to the centralized module. Usually in these networking infrastructures, i.e., heterogeneous networks, multiple devices \(C_{i}\) are eager to transmit captured data to a common receiver, that is, a CH or server module \(S_{j}\), and they preferably want to do this simultaneously. Furthermore, these resource-limited devices \(C_{i}\) are designed such that their transceiver modules can either perform the transmission of packets or the receiving, and they are not capable of performing both activities simultaneously. Therefore, the packet loss ratio and collision are among the common issues associated with these networking infrastructures. These issues become more severe if multiple devices \(C_{i}\) (preferably more than three) commence a proper communication sessions with a shared destination device \(S_{j}\), i.e., commence concurrent communication [8; 9]. Although it is a convincing approach, collision and hidden terminal scenarios are among the most common issues, which are required to be sorted on a priority basis. Likewise, distributed authentication control [10] and combined authentication/association [11] were reported to resolve the aforementioned issues. However, excessive registration time, the ratio of the collided packets, and latency are the challenges linked with these schemes. One of the most promising random access mechanisms is time division multiple access (TDMA), which was reported to enable the concurrent frame transmission of more devices \(C_{i}\) to a shared destination device, i.e., a server, with a certain degree of reliability [12]. In this scheme, every server \(S_{j}\) is belted to divide its active time frame into slots of equal sizes. Additionally, a reliable scheduling approach, i.e., a slot assignment, should be followed to resolve the conflicting scenarios among multiple source devices. Furthermore, every device \(C_{i}\) is forced to transmit captured data values, preferably in its dedicated slot.