Start of Frame Delimiters (SFDs) for Simultaneous Intra-Group One-to-All Dissemination

Abstract

Intra-group spreading is one of the common and frequent needs in many decentralized communication protocols. Such spreading is useful for quick and local dissemination of information among different clusters in large-scale decentralized systems like the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Complex decentralized protocols can carefully exploit such localized dissemination as a base unit for their efficient implementation. However, due to the inherent broadcast nature of wireless communication, efficient and simultaneous execution of multiple intra-group disseminations is difficult. In this work, we propose a novel and simple way to completely hide a wireless transmission without changing any channel or frequency. Next, we use this for supporting simultaneous intra-group disseminations. Rigorous evaluation of the proposed strategy over testbeds show significant improvement of upto 60% in reliability with similar average latency and radio-on time in comparison to the baseline where no additional mechanism is adopted for separation of intra-group communications.