Efficient Many-to-Many Data Sharing Using Synchronous Transmission and TDMA

Abstract

Achieving fast and efficient many-to-many communication is one of the most complex communication problems, especially in wireless systems. A compact form of many-to-many communication in a distributed system has the potential to bring huge benefit to many distributed algorithms and protocols. Many-to-many communication can be implemented as a sequential instantiations of a network wide one-to-many communication. One limitation of such an approach is that each individual instance of a one-to-many communication has to be given enough time to propagate through the whole network before the next instance. In addition, there is large overhead in generating the schedule for the sequence of individual one-to-many communications. In this work, we show that many-to-many communication can be more efficiently implemented as many parallel many-to-one communications. In this direction, we first develop an efficient TDMA based many-to-one communication module, and then use it in many-to-many setting. Our approach achieves a minimum about 20% to 50% improvements on latency (radio-on time) over the state-of-the-art solutions in a 90-node wireless sensor network testbed.