Deterministic Backbone Creation in an SINR Network without Knowledge of Location

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deterministic protocol for creating a network backbone in the SINR wireless model without requiring nodes to know their physical locations, relying only on label and neighborhood information.

Contribution

It presents the first efficient deterministic backbone creation protocol in SINR networks without location knowledge, assuming only label and neighborhood info.

Findings

Backbone created in O(Δ log^2 N) rounds.

Protocol works without location information.

Applicable to sensor deployments in challenging environments.

Abstract

For a given network, a backbone is an overlay network consisting of a connected dominating set with additional accessibility properties. Once a backbone is created for a network, it can be utilized for fast communication amongst the nodes of the network. The Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) model has become the standard for modeling communication among devices in wireless networks. For this model, the community has pondered what the most realistic solutions for communication problems in wireless networks would look like. Such solutions would have the characteristic that they would make the least number of assumptions about the availability of information about the participating nodes. Solving problems when nothing at all is known about the network and having nodes just start participating would be ideal. However, this is quite challenging and most likely not feasible. The pragmatic approach is then to make meaningful assumptions about the available information and present efficient solutions based on this information. We present a solution for creation of backbone in the SINR model, when nodes do not have access to their physical coordinates or the coordinates of other nodes in the network. This restriction models the deployment of nodes in various situations for sensing hurricanes, cyclones, and so on, where only information about nodes prior to their deployment may be known but not their actual locations post deployment. We assume that nodes have access to knowledge of their label, the labels of nodes within their neighborhood, the range from which labels are taken $[N]$ and the total number of participating nodes $n$. We also assume that nodes wake up spontaneously. We present an efficient deterministic protocol to create a backbone with a round complexity of $O(\Delta \lg^2 N)$.