Erasure Correction for Noisy Radio Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the computational capabilities of noisy radio networks, demonstrating how to simulate protocols with manageable overhead and establishing lower bounds on simulation efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces methods to reliably simulate non-adaptive protocols in noisy radio networks and proves lower bounds on simulation overhead.

Findings

Simulation of non-adaptive protocols incurs poly(log Δ, log log n) rounds overhead.

General protocols can be simulated with O(Δ log^2 Δ) rounds overhead.

An Ω(log Δ) overhead is necessary for certain simulations under natural assumptions.

Abstract

The radio network model is a well-studied model of wireless, multi-hop networks. However, radio networks make the strong assumption that messages are delivered deterministically. The recently introduced noisy radio network model relaxes this assumption by dropping messages independently at random. In this work we quantify the relative computational power of noisy radio networks and classic radio networks. In particular, given a non-adaptive protocol for a fixed radio network we show how to reliably simulate this protocol if noise is introduced with a multiplicative cost of $\mathrm{poly}(\log \Delta, \log \log n)$ rounds where $n$ is the number nodes in the network and $\Delta$ is the max degree. Moreover, we demonstrate that, even if the simulated protocol is not non-adaptive, it can be simulated with a multiplicative $O(\Delta \log ^2 \Delta)$ cost in the number of rounds. Lastly, we argue that simulations with a multiplicative overhead of $o(\log \Delta)$ are unlikely to exist by proving that an $\Omega(\log \Delta)$ multiplicative round overhead is necessary under certain natural assumptions.