Efficient Information Exchange in Single-Hop Multi-Channel Radio Networks

This paper studies the information exchange problem in single-hop multi-channel radio networks, which is to disseminate k messages stored in k arbitrary nodes to the entire network (with n nodes) with the fewest timeslots. By using Θ( √ n) channels, the previous best result [9] showed that this problem can be solved in Θ(k) time slots with high probability even if k is unknown and no bounds on k are given. Under the same assumptions but by using Θ(n) channels, this paper presents a novel randomized distributed algorithm called Detect-and-Drop that can solve the information exchange problem in O(log k log log k) time slots with high probability. Thus by allowing using more channels, our proposed algorithm contributes an exponential improvement in running time compared to that in [9]. The simulation results corroborate the analysis result.