51,491 research outputs found
On the Computational Power of Radio Channels
Radio networks can be a challenging platform for which to develop distributed algorithms, because the network nodes must contend for a shared channel. In some cases, though, the shared medium is an advantage rather than a disadvantage: for example, many radio network algorithms cleverly use the shared channel to approximate the degree of a node, or estimate the contention. In this paper we ask how far the inherent power of a shared radio channel goes, and whether it can efficiently compute "classicaly hard" functions such as Majority, Approximate Sum, and Parity.
Using techniques from circuit complexity, we show that in many cases, the answer is "no". We show that simple radio channels, such as the beeping model or the channel with collision-detection, can be approximated by a low-degree polynomial, which makes them subject to known lower bounds on functions such as Parity and Majority; we obtain round lower bounds of the form Omega(n^{delta}) on these functions, for delta in (0,1). Next, we use the technique of random restrictions, used to prove AC^0 lower bounds, to prove a tight lower bound of Omega(1/epsilon^2) on computing a (1 +/- epsilon)-approximation to the sum of the nodes\u27 inputs. Our techniques are general, and apply to many types of radio channels studied in the literature
Communication Primitives in Cognitive Radio Networks
Cognitive radio networks are a new type of multi-channel wireless network in
which different nodes can have access to different sets of channels. By
providing multiple channels, they improve the efficiency and reliability of
wireless communication. However, the heterogeneous nature of cognitive radio
networks also brings new challenges to the design and analysis of distributed
algorithms.
In this paper, we focus on two fundamental problems in cognitive radio
networks: neighbor discovery, and global broadcast. We consider a network
containing nodes, each of which has access to channels. We assume the
network has diameter , and each pair of neighbors have at least ,
and at most , shared channels. We also assume each node has at
most neighbors. For the neighbor discovery problem, we design a
randomized algorithm CSeek which has time complexity
. CSeek is flexible and robust,
which allows us to use it as a generic "filter" to find "well-connected"
neighbors with an even shorter running time. We then move on to the global
broadcast problem, and propose CGCast, a randomized algorithm which takes
time. CGCast uses
CSeek to achieve communication among neighbors, and uses edge coloring to
establish an efficient schedule for fast message dissemination.
Towards the end of the paper, we give lower bounds for solving the two
problems. These lower bounds demonstrate that in many situations, CSeek and
CGCast are near optimal
Robust Localization from Incomplete Local Information
We consider the problem of localizing wireless devices in an ad-hoc network
embedded in a d-dimensional Euclidean space. Obtaining a good estimation of
where wireless devices are located is crucial in wireless network applications
including environment monitoring, geographic routing and topology control. When
the positions of the devices are unknown and only local distance information is
given, we need to infer the positions from these local distance measurements.
This problem is particularly challenging when we only have access to
measurements that have limited accuracy and are incomplete. We consider the
extreme case of this limitation on the available information, namely only the
connectivity information is available, i.e., we only know whether a pair of
nodes is within a fixed detection range of each other or not, and no
information is known about how far apart they are. Further, to account for
detection failures, we assume that even if a pair of devices is within the
detection range, it fails to detect the presence of one another with some
probability and this probability of failure depends on how far apart those
devices are. Given this limited information, we investigate the performance of
a centralized positioning algorithm MDS-MAP introduced by Shang et al., and a
distributed positioning algorithm, introduced by Savarese et al., called
HOP-TERRAIN. In particular, for a network consisting of n devices positioned
randomly, we provide a bound on the resulting error for both algorithms. We
show that the error is bounded, decreasing at a rate that is proportional to
R/Rc, where Rc is the critical detection range when the resulting random
network starts to be connected, and R is the detection range of each device.Comment: 40 pages, 13 figure
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