\input zb-basic \input zb-ioport \iteman{io-port 05495071} \itemau{Degesys, Julius; Rose, Ian; Patel, Ankit; Nagpal, Radhika} \itemti{Self-organizing desynchronization and TDMA on wireless sensor networks.} \itemso{Li\`o, Pietro (ed.) et al., Bio-inspired computing and communication. First workshop on bio-inspired design of networks, BIOWIRE 2007, Cambridge, UK, April 2--5, 2007. Revised selected papers. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-540-92190-5/pbk). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5151, 192-203 (2008).} \itemab Summary: Desynchronization is a recently introduced primitive for sensor networks: it implies that nodes perfectly interleave periodic events to occur in a round-robin schedule. This primitive can be used to evenly distribute sampling burden in a group of nodes, schedule sleep cycles, or organize a collision-free TDMA schedule for transmitting wireless messages. Here we present a summary of Desync, a biologically-inspired self-maintaining algorithm for desynchronization in a single-hop network. We also describe Desync-TDMA, a self-adjusting TDMA protocol that addresses two weaknesses of traditional TDMA: it does not require a global clock and it automatically adjusts to the number of participating nodes, so that bandwidth is always fully utilized. \itemrv{~} \itemcc{} \itemut{desynchronization; self-organization; wireless sensor networks; pulse-coupled oscillators; medium access control} \itemli{doi:10.1007/978-3-540-92191-2\_18} \end