A partition based slot assignment method and apparatus, applying to other nodes than a sink node in a multi-hop sensor network including: transmitting a detection request packet including subtree information of a subtree of the sink node, using a node one-hop away as a root node; determining whether other nodes and the sink node are in the same subtree according to received detection request packets transmitted by other nodes including subtree information of subtrees of the other nodes; and storing the subtree information of the subtrees of other nodes in a local collision table if the other nodes and sink node are not in a same subtree, and transmitting the table to a parent node of the sink node. By changing a slot assignment in a larger network into independent slot assignments in smaller networks, a slot assignment problem resulting from a large number of nodes may be solved.