Analysis of a Simple Randomized Protocol to Establish Communication in Bounded Degree Sensor Networks

Abstract

Co-operative computations in a network of sensor nodes rely on an established, interference free and repetitive communication between adjacent sensors. This paper analyzes a simple randomized and distributed protocol to establish a periodic communication schedule S where each sensor broadcasts once to communicate to all of its neighbors during each period of S. The result obtained holds for any bounded degree network. The existence of such randomized protocols is not new. Our protocol reduces the number of random bits and the number of transmissions by individual sensors from Θ(log² n) to O(logn) where n is the number of sensor nodes. These reductions conserve power which is a critical resource. Both protocols assume upper bound on the number of nodes n and the maximum number of neighbors ${\cal B}$. For a small multiplicative (i.e., a factor ω(1)) increase in the resources, our algorithm can operate without an upper bound on ${\cal B}$.