The goal of this paper is to present OSERENA, a distributed coloring algorithm optimized for dense wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Network density has an extremely reduced impact on the size of the messages exchanged to color the WSN. Furthermore, the number of colors used to color the network is not impacted by this optimization. We describe in this paper the properties of the algorithm and prove its correctness and termination. Simulation results point out the considerable gains in bandwidth.