BLITZ: A Network Architecture for Low Latency and Energy-efficient Event-triggered Wireless Communication

We consider wireless sensing systems where an event must be rapidly communicated from its source to a remote host. Due to the non-deterministic nature of event arrivals, multi-hop dissemination using state-of-the-art radio duty-cycled protocols leads to a trade-off between latency and energy efficiency. In order to circumvent this system design constraint, we propose BLITZ, a network architecture that leverages interference-based flooding to rapidly wake-up the multi-hop network and disseminate the event on-demand. We show that by embracing network flooding in combination with simultaneous transmissions, we can realize low latency event-triggered multi-hop communication without having to sacrifice energy efficiency. We introduce an analytical model to quantify the limits of our approach, present a prototype implementation using a multi-radio wireless sensor platform, and experimentally evaluate BLITZ in a laboratory setting and in an indoor testbed.