``Slow
is Fast'' for Wireless Sensor Networks in the Presence of Message Losses
Transformations
from shared memory model to wireless sensor networks (WSNs)quickly become
inefficient in the presence of prevalent message losses in WSNs, and this
prohibits their wider adoption.
To address this problem, we propose a variation of the shared memory model, the
{\sf SF} shared memory model, where the
actions of each node are partitioned into {\sf slow} actions and {\sf
fast} actions.
The traditional shared memory model consists only of fast actions and a lost
message can disable the nodes from execution. Slow actions, on the other hand,
enable the nodes to use slightly stale state from other nodes, so a message
loss does not prevent the nodes from execution. We quantify over the advantages
of using slow actions under environments with varying message loss
probabilities, and find that a slow action has asymptotically better chance of
getting executed than a fast action when the message loss probability
increases.
We also present guidelines for helping the protocol designer identify which
actions can be marked as slow so as to enable the transformed program to be
more loosely-coupled, and tolerate communication problems (latency, loss)
better.
Paper:
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