“Slow is Fast” for wireless sensor networks in the presence of message losses

Abstract

h i g h l i g h t s• None of the existing computational models consider message loss/collision in the distributed systems.• WAC model is a model that considers message loss in distributed systems. However, it reduces the performance. • Our work is a variation of the shared memory model, namely SF shared memory model. • It can improve the performance in the presence of message loss.• We present an analytical proof (and evaluations for three protocols) for our SF model. a b s t r a c tWe present a new shared memory model, SF shared memory model. In this model, the actions of each node are partitioned into slow actions and fast actions. By contrast, the traditional shared memory model only includes fast actions. Intuitively, slow actions can utilize slightly stale state information to execute successfully. However, fast actions require that the state information they use is most recent.We show that the use of slow actions can substantially benefit in improving performance of programs from the shared memory model to WAC model that has been designed for sensor networks. To illustrate this, we use three protocols concerning problems that need to be solved in sensor networks. We show that under various message loss probabilities, densities, etc., slow actions can improve the performance substantially, since slow actions reduce the performance penalty of fast actions under heavy message loss environments. Moreover, the effectiveness of the slow action increases when there is a higher probability of message loss.