Mantilla-González, IvonneIvonneMantilla-GonzálezTurau, VolkerVolkerTurau2022-11-022022-11-022022-0618th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS 2022)http://hdl.handle.net/11420/13891The MAC protocol IEEE 802.15.4 DSME has features for WSNs to support exigent requirements such as high reliability and adaptability to dynamic traffic. This work introduces the concept of a virtual sink, which comprises the sink and its 1-hop neighbors, a.k.a. satellites, as the core of a strategy to alleviate the burden caused by the funneling effect in data collection scenarios. Our strategy enables the coexistence of a centralized scheduling algorithm at the virtual sink and a decentralized scheduling algorithm for the remaining nodes of the network. Through a simulative assessment, we compare the performance of the virtual sink-based strategy with the status quo of DSME via a decentralized slot scheduler TPS. Results show an improvement of the network throughput of up to 38% and a reduction of the energy consumption of about 30% at satellites.enFunneling effectheuristic scheduling algorithmIEEE 802.15.4 DSMEvirtual sinkConference Paper10.1109/DCOSS54816.2022.00015Conference Paper