For TDMA MAC protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), redundancy and retransmission are two important methods to provide high end-to-end transmission reliability. Since reliable transmissions will lead to more energy consumption, there exists an intrinsic tradeoff between transmission reliability and energy efficiency. For each link, we name the number of its reserved time slots in each MAC superframe as a replicator factor. In the following paper, we propose a reliability-lifetime tradeoff framework (RLTF) for WSNs to study replicator factor control problem. First, for the redundancy TDMA MAC, we formulate replicator factor control problem as convex programming. By the gradient projection method, we develop a fully distributed algorithm to solve the convex programming. Second, for the retransmission TDMA MAC, we set the retransmission upper bound for each link according to the optimal replicator factors under the redundancy MAC and compute the total communication overhead for the retransmission MAC. Finally, we compare the communication overhead of these two MAC protocols under different channel conditions.